Use These Popular Christmas Colors to Decorate Your Home with Holiday Cheer

With the Christmas season getting into full swing, it is time to decorate the house for the holidays. But what color palette will you use?

Traditional Christmas colors are popular for a reason, but modern interior designers remind us that a wide range of colors can showcase the Christmas spirit. 

When deciding which Christmas colors to use for your motif, you can incorporate the symbolism behind specific colors while embracing your love for certain aesthetics.

What Are the Traditional Christmas Colors?

Red and green reign supreme as popular Christmas colors, but those who want a traditional look with a more balanced palette can also embrace golds, silvers, light blues, and whites. 

These extra colors can be used on their own or to supplement your traditional greens and reds. 

Christmas Colors and Symbolism

Humanity’s use of color to represent ideas spans millennia. We thought about what colors mean before we ever recorded our thoughts on paper. 

The traditional Christmas colors speak to our use of imagery and symbolism, as each represents a crucial aspect of the holiday – and life in general. 

What Do Red & Green Represent?

Red and green have long held symbolic importance. Both colors represent life, but in different ways.

Green

Green is the color of nature, growth, and renewal.

It represents abundance, prosperity, and new life. The representation comes directly from nature, with fresh spring buds portending the end of winter and the possibilities of spring. 

Green’s historical association with growth and renewal led to further associations with wealth, luck, prosperity, and abundance.

Red

Red also represents life, but aligns more with vigor, health, and intense emotions than the calming growth associated with green.

Red, the color of blood and fire, symbolizes passion. It’s what we need to survive and thrive.

Red and Green as Christmas Colors

Red and Green’s association with life is not the only reason they shine during the holiday season.

One theory holds that red and green became associated with Christmas due to their natural occurrence on Christmas plants. The evergreen maintains its color all year long, and holly plants shine with bright red berries during winter.

Pre-Christian holiday traditions support this theory.  Although evergreens are now commonly associated with Christmas, they harken back to an older holiday predating Christianity.

Pagan peoples celebrated the winter solstice in late December, long before Christians claimed the timeframe for their lord’s birth. The Celtics called it the Yule holiday, hosting a festival to commemorate the longest night of the year and look forward to the eventual return of new life in the spring. At the same time, the Romans celebrated Saturnalia, decorating their homes with wreaths and greenery.

Many of our beloved Christmas traditions find their beginnings in Yule celebrations. The Celtics held evergreen trees in high esteem, as they are the only plants that maintain their lush coloration throughout the harsh winters. Worshippers hung gifts and offerings to the gods in Evergreen groves; a practice often considered the precursor to our modern tradition of decorating Christmas trees. 

Red May Not Have Such a Long History

Although associated with the Yule celebration due to holly berries on ivy, red wasn’t always one of the primary Christmas colors.

Coca-Cola solidified red as a primary Christmas color by creating the contemporary view of Santa Claus as the cheerful old man with rosy cheeks donning a fluffy red suit. Before Coke’s advertising campaign, cultures portrayed St. Nicholas in various ways with a range of colors. He was a tall man in bishop’s cloaks, a hunter in animal skins, and even an elf.

The soft drink company changed Santa’s image and helped propel red, its brand color, into the public’s mind as a Christmas color.

Red and Green in Christian Traditions

As we know it today, Christmas is a Christian holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ. Although many Christmas colors originated with pre-Christian traditions, the religion also imbues them with its own symbolism.

Some traditions use holly to symbolize the crown of thorns affixed to Jesus’s head before his crucifixion. The red berries represent his blood, spilled as an ultimate sacrifice, while the evergreen bush illustrates his (and, as an extension, humanity’s) immortality. 

Red’s representation of Christ’s blood is a common theme in Christianity and is essential to Christmas and the spring holiday of Easter.

What Do the Supplemental Christmas Colors Represent?

The golds, silvers, light blues, and whites associated with Christmas have symbolically significant meanings as well. When choosing your Christmas color palette, you can pick colors based on their meaning or choose an aesthetic based on principles of color theory.

Gold

Gold gets its name from the precious metal and is commonly associated with wealth, success, and prestige. 

Gold’s association with Christmas has deep roots. The three wise men gave the infant Jesus Christ a gift of gold in addition to frankincense and myrrh.

Silver

Although silver represents wealth, it’s also associated with grace and elegance. 

Silver’s unique reflective characteristic also leads to representations as a mirror into our own true natures. Silver is also associated with strength and the destruction of evil.

Light Blue

Light blue symbolizes peace and calm. In Christian traditions, it’s commonly associated with Jesus’s mother, Mary, as a symbol of the divine. 

Secular Christmas traditions often use light blues to represent the snow and ice everyone hopes to see during the holiday.

White

White is a color of purity. It represents virtue, peace, and goodness. The Bible often uses white to symbolize innocence, and Jesus is often depicted wearing white robes. 

However, earlier religious traditions also used the color for similar purposes.

Which Colors Should You Use When Decorating?

Decorating a home for the holidays is about more than the symbolism behind each color. 

Choosing colors may be based on various needs, such as your personal tastes, whether the colors match, the mood you are trying to create, and current popular trends.

Personal Aesthetic

Your home may already follow specific color schemes, which may not match the traditional red and green. 

Emily Herrig, Interior Staging Consultant and writer at Hello Sensible, looks at the space she is decorating to determine which colors would pair well with the existing décor.

Because Herrig enjoys a modern look in her own home, she adds holiday decorations with silver and navy blue.

Color Balance

Understanding color balance is key to the perfect holiday décor. Some color combinations work better than others. It’s important to have harmony and ensure that colors match.

A color wheel is an excellent tool for determining which colors go best together. It showcases primary colors and their complements and helps you pick an appealing motif based on color theory.            

Mood

Some colors are soothing, while others give off a certain warmth. Different shades of the same color may give different feelings. Warm colors may arouse happiness and optimism, while cool colors suggest calm.

Although typically reds, yellows, and oranges are associated with warmth, and blues, greens, and purples are associated with cold, different shades of each can lean towards the other side. 

Choose a more neutral blue with hints of orange if you want to use blue while maintaining a warm atmosphere.

Christmas Color Trends

Sometimes we want our home to look like it stepped out of a magazine, and the best way to do that is to follow modern trends while decorating.

Alicia Richards, the owner of home décor resource For the Love of Decorating, says we are seeing a return to classic Christmas colors in darker hues this year. She recommends choosing burgundy, forest greens, and gold as your primary three colors.

Wilson agrees but also indicates that we can expect to see blues and whites in the stores. She says that adding blue to your color palette adds a pop of color and reminds us that most blue hues will work. 

Dark navy blue is an excellent choice for a warm, muted motif, while light blue goes well with bright silvers and golds.

Christmas Color Palette Ideas

If you need assistance finding the perfect Christmas palette for your home this year, check out these ideas from Pinterest.

1. This warm palette offers traditional Christmas colors in warm, muted forest greens and deep reds. The neutral oranges and browns give the décor an earthy feel.

 

2. A winter wonderland palette offering varying shades of cool blue to represent cold and ice, with a pop of red to draw the eye.

 

3. Embody the spirit of joy this Christmas with a bright, festive color scheme.

 

4. Stick to tradition with cheerful reds and greens balanced by a hint of black

 

5. This color scheme showcases how the same colors can have vastly different effects depending on whether they are brilliant or muted. Though the colors are nearly the same as in the previous palette, they are less saturated and warmer, giving vastly different feelings.

 

More Color Schemes

This pin showcases six more examples of Christmas color schemes you can consider for your decorating needs.

 

Embrace the Holiday Spirit with Whichever Palette You Choose!

You don’t have to stick with traditional Christmas colors when decorating for the holidays. Choose a color palette that speaks to you, and enjoy a festive holiday season!