Nature and Garden Inspired Home Made Holiday Décor Ideas

As the warm season for most of us comes to a close, and the holidays fast approach, many of us find ourselves in the mood to decorate. Decorating often goes hand in hand with crafting, especially for the kids. Using nature as inspiration for holiday decorating is a wonderful way to create beautiful, tasteful crafts that will light up your home for the holidays.


Gathering your materials can be as simple as taking a walk through the park, or even your own garden. Commonly found items such as pine cones, acorns, feathers, sticks, leaves, seeds, and even flowers all make wonderful materials to start with. Adding other materials such as moss and bark adds rustic charm. We’ve put together some fun and simple ideas for creating nature and garden inspired homemade holiday decorations that you’ll love.


  • Sticks and slices of small diameter wood from the woodpile can become beautiful Christmas tree ornaments. We especially love the peanut snowmen ornament idea on this blog, topped with hats of acorn tops. Fill clear glass or plastic ball ornaments with beautiful bits of nature- seed heads, maybe some berries from the beautiful Winterberry holly too.
  • This blog as cute ideas for making Christmas Elves has a wonderful idea using gumnuts (if you have a gumnut tree nearby).  To make adorable people-shaped ornaments for your Christmas tree. You could easily use galls instead of gumnuts, which are easy to find this time of year. Galls are round or oblong hard lumps often found in stems of plants such as Goldenrod or milkweed. Galls are formed by beetle larvae living in the stem and don’t usually harm the plant. They do leave behind a neat looking craft bobble though- perfect for crafting!
  • We came across this blog post about fun ideas for a craft party! There are ideas for making twig stars, as well as carved oranges. Oranges are naturally resistant to decay and they release their scent through oils in their rind as they dehydrate.
  • If you’re a chicken keeper (or duck, or turkey, whatever you have), you may have lots of feathers around this time of year, as it’s molting season for most birds. If you have kids, you may have found that kids like to pick up and collect these feathers. You can repurpose your feathers and make adorable feather wreaths, like this one! Washing feathers first in warm water and Dawn and setting out to dry is advised before you start crafting.
  • These absolutely adorable rustic twig arrows made with feathers, twigs, and beads would make fantastic little gifts and look adorable on the tree. Carefully drill holes into acorns for beads too.
  • Birch bark is a fun craft item that is easy and beautiful to craft with this time of year. Harvesting bark is pretty easy, as you can see from this tutorial. You can harvest from most any kinds of birch- most popular being paper birch. River birch is fine too- in fact, river birch bark peels on its own so harvesting becomes really easy. If you have an eye for using a craft knife and a leaf stencil, you can make this absolutely stunning birch bark leaf wreath, as one wonderful example of crafting with birch bark.

We hope you find some inspiration with these fun crafty decorating ideas using natural materials from your garden and out in nature! 

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