Rustic Burgundy Christmas Tree

This rustic burgundy Christmas tree is sure to please anyone who loves nature and using natural elements in their decorating! The dried oranges, leaves and stems pair perfectly with the burgundy and gold color palette.

Hey guys! I’m back for round two on sharing my Christmas decor. Last week I shared my traditional red and green Christmas tree and now you get to see the other tree in our dining room. This rustic burgundy Christmas tree turned out so good! I love the simplicity of all the natural elements mixed with the moody colors of brown, bronze and burgundy. I think it is a contender for one of my favorite trees that I’ve decorated!

This year I was sticking to mostly what I had on hand or could scrounge up for my Christmas decorating. Truth be told, I am running out of storage room for my Christmas decor! It may be time to thin the herd! Nooooo!!! 🙁 That is one of the things about living in Florida that is unfortunate, no basements to store all your holiday decorations!! So you have to become very creative about how to store things. Mr. Wonderful and I made some really nice storage shelves in the garage that hang from the ceiling! They work great but they also have limits on how much we can put up there.

In light of that, I decided to use more natural elements in my decorating this year. Things like dried florals and leaves, pinecones and feathers. All of these items were free to collect from nature itself! Just takes a little time. I was also lucky to find some fall florals on clearance at Michaels to add in some of the burgundy color.

Oranges for Christmas

I’m sure you all have seen the dried oranges showing up on Christmas trees in the last several years! Well I had never tried it and wanted to jump on that bandwagon. Ha! They turned out fantastic! I love how they look like stained glass when the light shines through them!

I thought about doing a blog post about how to dehydrate them in the oven but it is all over the internet already and super easy to find! A couple tips that I found to help them stay orange and not get too burnt looking is to first slice them very thin. This way they dry out faster. Also, after you slice them, pat them dry with a thin towel on both sides to try to get out the excess juices. Let them dry out overnight on the counter before placing them in the oven the next day and bake on the lowest setting that your oven will go, mine was like 170 degrees. Turn them every 2 hours and take them out if it looks like they are getting a little dark. They will finish completely dehydrating by air drying.

I cut up one whole bag of oranges and was able to use them in my tree, in the garland, in the centerpiece and even made an orange garland to drape over the mirror. Needless to say, you get quite a few! The nice thing is that since they are dried out, they should be able to be used repeatedly for years. That remains to be seen, I plan to keep mine in a Ziploc bag. I will update you next year on how they hold up. 😉

Collect items from outside

Another natural item on my tree this year are magnolia leaves! If you are lucky enough to have magnolia trees where you live, you can use them too! Otherwise, faux is your friend. 🙂 I really wish I got a picture of the tree when it was newly decorated with the leaves, they looked amazing! Unfortunately I did not, however, the great thing about using magnolia leaves is that they dry out well too! They hold some of the green color on one side and the bronze on the other. I also really like the look of the dried magnolia stems and they fit the tree well.

A touch of Home

If you don’t know, we used to live in the Midwest and moved to Florida about 4.5 years ago. It is very common there to decorate with a rustic cabin decor, and that includes the way my Mom decorates. When I told her I was decorating a rustic tree this year, she asked if I needed any items like pheasant feathers and deer antlers as they have plenty! LOL! I took her up on the pheasant feathers but passed on the deer antlers, it would have been a little harder to get those down here. 🙂

I used them in the centerpiece on the table as well! When our third son, who really likes that type of decor, saw this all, he said he really loved it and that it looks like Grandma’s house! I took that as a compliment!

I did find some really cool pinecone ornaments at Walmart this year that I picked up. They are metal and make a pretty chime sound when they hit together. So I added those to the tree along with some real pinecones.

I also found some pretty burgundy and gold wrapping paper at Michaels when I was there. It looks beautiful under the tree paired with some plain kraft colored paper with burgundy and gold ribbon. 

Christmas dining room decor

The rest of the dining room coordinates with the rustic burgundy Christmas tree too! On the buffet table, I added some greenery with lights and the same magnolia stems and dried oranges.

On one end, I added some brown and amber vases with one of the DIY wood Christmas trees that I made several years ago.

One the other side, I added a vase with some faux florals and more trees.

On the mirror is a magnolia leaf wreath and some bells with bronze ribbon. I added the burgundy ornaments to look like berries. I added some more oranges to a bell garland that I had and draped that across the mirror. Isn’t is so cute?!

The magnolia wreath is one that I have had around for a while. Luckily it fit the theme I had going. 🙂

Rustic Christmas Centerpiece

On the dining room table, I added our DIY dough bowl with some greenery stems, ornaments, oranges, pinecones and more Christmas trees. This time I used another previous DIY project, these raffia Christmas trees.

Last but not least, the window ledge has some coordinating pillows as usual. Along with the three tiered tray decorated with a rustic theme.

Do you like the rustic theme this year? I know I could have gone even more rustic but I like the touches of it better for now. Maybe a woodland tree would be a fun idea in the future! We’ll see! I am signing off for the rest of 2025, I hope you all have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!