Enjoying the Small Things

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Our Top Ten Christmas Movies and Connection through the Holidays

December 20, 2020 By Kelle

Our Top Ten Christmas Movies and Connection through the Holidays

This post is sponsored by Amazon.

There are a hundred places we all wish we could be this holiday—at the neighbor’s Christmas party with the rosemary cookies she always makes, in our sister’s living room with cousins and stories and the good Bing Crosby playlist, shopping on Michigan Avenue with all the festive window displays, popping into coffee shops for hot chocolate and people watching—strangers in furry coats on their way to celebrations.

…but we are home, and we’ve made the best of it, clinging to words like “cozy” and “huddle” for the silver lining they are.

We’re big fans of our Amazon Devices and the ways they make life more convenient and connect us to things and people we love, so I thought it might be fun to share two of our favorite Amazon Devices that are bringing joy to our 2020 “Home for the Holidays” theme.

First up…our Fire TV Stick. We access all our favorite movies and shows with ours, have given it as a gift to so many of our family members and always bring it with us on trips. We have limited cable up at my dad’s cabin in Michigan, so we always bring our Fire TV Stick for our summer trips. Without it, I wouldn’t have our sweet memories of being holed up in the cabin on rainy nights, watching the Babysitter’s Club with Lainey.

This year, we’re huddling up for cozy holiday movie nights with our Fire TV Stick.

I was thrilled to find an old favorite Christmas movie from my youth on Amazon Prime Video—All I Want for Christmas—and shared it with my kids. Lainey said it’s her new favorite holiday movie.

…which brings me to the very important list of my Top 10 Holiday Movies of All Time:

1. Family Stone (Don’t even get me started. Dysfunctional families who love each other are my favorite family movies ever…see also: Dan in Real Life, While You Were Sleeping…)
2. White Christmas (this my “Me & Brett” movie. We love watching it together.)
3. Elf (does the burp scene ever get old?)
4. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (another favorite to watch with Brett. Clark is his idol.)
5. Little Women (Winona Ryder version—the cozy scenes in this movie!)
6. Home Alone
7. All I Want for Christmas
8. Miracle on 34th Street (1994 version)
9. Christmas with the Kranks
10. A Christmas Story

Fun little holiday bonus? Sometimes I bring my favorite holiday movies into the bathroom with the help of our Amazon Echo Show so I can take my time with my nightly ritual while enjoying a little hit of holiday joy.

That brings me to our other favorite Amazon Device, especially in a year of feeling so disconnected—our Echo Show. Our Echo Show is our most used Amazon Device. We listen to music all day long with it, ask Alexa questions with it, pull up recipes, enjoy old photos displayed on it (it works like a digital picture frame), watch shows and movies on it and make video calls to family with it. Recently, we all huddled around it to watch Nella show my 91-year-old grandma how good she can read.

It’s so nice have devices that bring us together and offer us tools to be closer to our families, especially during a year when we need it most.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

The Sacred Coffee Ritual

December 15, 2020 By Kelle

The Sacred Coffee Ritual

This post is sponsored by Storyville.

I wake up before 5 every day—not to be ambitious; just to be alone. I slip into the darkness of my kitchen, light a candle and begin the sacred rituals of my morning. Coffee is one of those sacred rituals, elevated from a simple daily routine by my full presence in the moment and special details that make it one of the most enjoyable rituals of my day. I didn’t discover this on my own. It’s been modeled to me since I was child. My mom would stop traffic upon noticing the perfect pottery mug in a shop window; and when I lived with my grandparents in college, morning coffee was the foundation of the day. Never a morning went by that I didn’t wake to a coffee tray on the kitchen counter, prepared for me by my grandma, complete with an empty mug, a tiny pitcher of cream, a stirring spoon and a small glass of thick apricot juice I pretended to enjoy. So many of my favorite memories have happened around coffee—telling stories with my siblings, huddled together in someone’s living room while we clutch our cups the morning after a family sleepover, girlfriend brunches that extended far beyond when we told our husbands we’d be back, pouring a third cup at my friend’s kitchen counter while I watch her knead dough for cinnamon rolls, the first cup on Christmas morning…

An elevated coffee ritual, as silly as it may seem, has brought consistent joy to a year full of uncertainty and disappointment. And for a lot of people working at home now, there’s less going out for coffee—an even better reason to invest some love into our at home morning ritual.

So let’s dig in to how coffee should be done. Florida knows how to do orange juice, but coffee? Seattle’s where it’s at. So let’s go to Seattle, shall we? On Yelp, if you look who’s ranked #1 in Seattle, you’ll find an artisan coffee roaster, Storyville, their very name chosen from the idea of two friends sharing their stories over cups of coffee. As they put it, “Our coffee is more than just a drink to wake you in the morning – it’s a reason to slow down, take a breath, and enjoy the world around you.” Wine Enthusiast has named Storyville the #1 roaster in America.

They roast and ship fresh. So I tried it. How amazing to have #1 Seattle coffee delivered at home. Over the years, I’ve had several different coffee makers. Everyone has their preference of how their coffee’s made and how fast they can get it, but my favorite has always been the French press system. I find the steps involved add to the idea of ritual—you can’t just push a button and get it quick (although Storyville makes coffee for that too if you like the convenience).

Enter the MVP…the Freedom I Coffee System.

It’s everything you need for that beloved French press cup in the most beautiful premium home brewing package that includes a conical burr grinder, a 48 oz. coffee press, an electric water kettle, a console to keep it all organized and beautifully displayed, an accessory kit, a valet to store the accessories, four Storyville porcelain mugs and two bags of Storyville coffee which is, might I add, extraordinary.

Prologue is their regular blend comprised of 3 different varietals from 3 different continents. Each varietal is roasted separately and then blended together. The 100% Arabica bean varietals are curated from the top 2% of beans in the world. The flavor is delicious—bold and smooth with no bitterness or after taste.

Together, their coffee and beautiful hardware creates a heavenly morning ritual, not only for the delight of flavor and smells but for the entire sensory experience. Look how pretty it is!

 

Storyville also creates compatible Keurig pods and Nespresso capsules—roasted, ground and packaged with the same premium Storyville beans and shipped FRESH directly from their Seattle Roastery.

Storyville is also a For-Giving Company®, partnering with organizations working to end human trafficking.

They offer their amazing coffee for however you prefer it brewed in coffee subscriptions so you can consistently enjoy it at home. There’s nothing worse than waking up and heading to the kitchen to start your coffee ritual only to discover you’re out of coffee.

Get a Storyville subscription and receive 76% off your first shipment with promo code KELLE.

I always find it easier to invest in things that will bring me joy every single day when we have no problem investing in a great pair of shoes we will only wear a few times a month. Coffee is one of those things.

.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Our Living Room Glow Up

December 4, 2020 By Kelle

Our Living Room Glow Up

I’ve been meaning to post our living room glow up. Now that it’s all decorated for Christmas, I figured it’s the perfect time. It’s more of a cosmetic glow-up as opposed to a full transformation because the bigger things we’d like to do to transform the living room (rip out the soffit, rebuild the fireplace wall, put custom built-in cabinets around the TV, etc.) require a lot more time and money. Our cosmetic glow up made such a huge difference though, and the room feels so much more “us”—makes me so happy!

I’ve always been aesthetically against having a sectional couch, but after staying in several Airbnb’s over the years, I’ve fallen in love with sectionals (a good one, at least) and the way they bring our family together into a good huddle and make a room feel warm and inviting. I pictured movie nights with us all sprawled across the couch, pillows everywhere and as close as we can be to each other. So this summer while we were in Michigan, I noticed a site I love was having a great sale, so I pulled the trigger on a sectional I’d been eyeing. The rest was history. If you give a mouse a cookie.

Let’s start with where our living room was before. I actually loved our couches, but I wish I would have been more daring and gone with something that had a little more character. There were a few design things in the room I knew were off as well that could be simply fixed. First problem—our curtains were too short, so they were hung just above the window. I knew buying longer curtains and hanging them closer to the ceiling would make the room look bigger. This window wall was also a constant frustration. It’s really great for flooding the room with light, but there was nothing grounding on that wall—no place to hang art above the couch, no stopping point for the eye. The lanai is right behind that door, and with nothing grounding to stop the eye from looking beyond, it just became a giant sea of clutter—pool floats, lanai furniture, beach towels hanging everywhere. I wanted either a dark color on this wall or a fabulous wallpaper to ground the room and create separation between the living room and the lanai.

The other problem is this TV wall. I really want to close off the bookshelves with cabinetry and have a Frame TV here, but for now, I needed an easy cosmetic fix—paint behind the TV so it doesn’t stand out so much.

So a little paint, some wallpaper, new curtains properly hung, a delicious velvet sectional and some pops of color…

Our Glow Up:

The sectional is the Asher corner sectional from Interior Define in Peacock. I ordered it on the last day of the sale, and I wish I would have ordered swatches because I probably would have gone with the emerald green. The peacock is more blue than I thought it would be; and if I was going to go blue, I would have done the cobalt. But it’s grown on me and I still love it.

It’s such a fun color to play with contrasts for pillows and accessories. I like down throw pillows, so most of the pillows are either pillow covers with down inserts or pillows that came with zip covers and polyfill inserts, so I could switch their polyfill for down. I sourced everything at the bottom of this post.

Other than the couch, my favorite thing in the room is the wallpaper. Once I ordered the couch, I started playing around with different wallpaper and accessories by visually laying them out in story boards (see how the photo of the couch here looks more green?).

Once I found this wallpaper from Anthropologie, it was a done deal.

It creates the exact effect I was hoping for in this room. This window also never had trim (not sure why), so my dad added some which makes it look so much more finished, especially with the curtains hung higher.

Painting behind the TV hides the TV and helps make that area look a lot less cluttered too.

I knew I wanted a lighter colored round coffee table because of the darker colored corner sectional and spent hours this summer searching for one. I’d find something I love and then realize it was too low, or the diameter wasn’t big enough, or it was out of stock. I had my sister on the hunt, my cousin on it, links being texted day after day. I had ordered this one (still love it!) in Winterwood from West Elm, but the wait time on it was so long (Covid has really delayed a lot of furniture production!). We ended up canceling the West Elm one and choosing this one from Haverty’s over their Labor Day sale because they offered an amazing protection plan at an extra cost if it gets damaged (which is likely in our home). It wasn’t supposed to come until late January, but we got lucky and they called us last month and reported it came early. I haven’t styled it yet with what I really want to display, but for now…Christmas :o)

The chairs are from Joss & Main (also available at Wayfair), and we love them. They’re 50% off right now. Someday, when our dog is less crazy and our kids are older, we’ll invest in an amazing wool rug or something vintage. I love Rugs USA for these rough-on-stuff years, and this rug we bought is the perfect foundation for a bolder couch (we did 9 x 12).

I’m mostly happy for more color in this space. It feels so much more “us.”

We’ll normally position the sectional against the window wall and only have it this way to make room for the tree, but it’s nice to have this option (which is why I wanted a corner sectional). Is it just me, or do you walk in people’s houses and wonder where the tree goes? I have a friend who’s buying a house and my first question when I saw the living room was, “Where will the tree go?” Obviously not everyone puts trees up and I’m evaluating the world based on my own celebrations here, but seriously—very important design question for those who are into trees.

 

 

All Sources:

Corner Sectional
Chairs
Coffee Table
Seagrass Accent Table (out of stock right now)
Marble Top Accent Table
Rug
Merete Curtains (my sister got me on to these IKEA curtains—they never fail. And they come in extra long sizes for our high walls,)
Wallpaper
Mantel Mirror: antique, a present from Heidi for my 40th birthday
Test Tube Plant Holders on Plant Wall

Pillows
Down Inserts (I always buy 22 x 22 inch inserts for 20 inch pillow covers. I like them fully stuffed. I’ve bought this 2-pack so many times. All of the throw pillows in our house have these in them.)
Salmon Velvet Pillow (We have several of these velvet pillows from World Market. They’re super affordable and have a zipper so you can take the polyfill out and replace it with a down insert.)
Golden Velvet Pillow
Oui pillow was Clare V for Anthropologie but no longer available
Red Pom Pom Pillow (so glad I snagged one of these—just bummed it doesn’t have a zipper)
Black and White Pillow (my mom had this on her couch, and I loved it so much I ordered one from her house)

Happy Weekending!

Filed Under: Uncategorized

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