The best holiday throw pillows aren't holiday pillows at all. Choose covers by color and pattern (plaid, deep red, evergreen, a good ticking stripe) instead of by motif, and the pillows you put out in December will still look right on January 15th, when the tree is gone and the living room suddenly feels empty.
Every year around Thanksgiving I get the same question from customers: what should I put on the sofa for Christmas? And every year my answer disappoints people slightly before it relieves them. You don't need Christmas pillows. You need winter pillows that happen to look wonderful under a wreath.
Buy the color, not the character
A pillow with a snowman on it has a working life of roughly four weeks and spends the other forty-eight in a bin. A pillow in a deep red and blue plaid works from November through February, and honestly looks fine in October too. The holiday feeling in a room comes from the greenery, the candles, the lit tree, and the fact that everyone you love is in the house. The pillows only have to hold up the color story. Let them.
Plaid is the workhorse of December
If you buy one thing for the season, make it plaid. It's the pattern that signals holiday without ever saying the word, and it plays beautifully with the florals and toiles most of our customers already own. Our blue and red plaid cover is the one I reach for at home. One is enough. A second plaid tips the whole room into cabin territory, which is a lovely look but a different one.
Two pillows is a whole holiday
Here's the arrangement I'd suggest for almost any sofa: keep your two anchor pillows, swap in one plaid and one small-scale pattern in a coordinating color, and stop. That's it. Two new covers, five minutes, and the room turns over. It costs a fraction of a full seasonal set, and because you're only swapping the fabric, you're not storing four extra inserts in the garage in July.
Red without the candy-cane effect
Bright pure red next to bright pure green is what makes a room look like a card aisle. The fix is to shift one of them. Pick a red that leans brick, berry, or strawberry, like our strawberry stripe floral, or pick a green that's gone deep and slightly grey, then let real greenery supply the contrast. One saturated color per grouping is the ceiling.
Blue and white is a Christmas palette too
If your house doesn't do red, it doesn't have to. Blue-and-white chinoiserie against fresh evergreen is one of the most beautiful holiday combinations there is, and it's the reason ginger jars and pine sprigs turn up together on so many mantels. A blue bamboo lattice or an imperial jade trellis cover carries December perfectly and then just keeps going. Our chinoiserie decor guide has more on building that palette.
Remember the guest room and the entry
December is the one month the whole house gets seen. A single fresh lumbar on the entry bench and one new cover at the head of the guest bed do more for arriving family than another garland. These are also the smallest, least expensive spots to change, which is a nice thing to know in the middle of holiday shopping.
Order by early November
Every cover is cut and sewn to order in our Charlotte, NC studio, and production takes one to three weeks before shipping, so the first week of November is the honest cutoff for pillows you want in place before guests arrive. Because made to order also means final sale, order a $5 fabric sample if you're unsure how a red or a green will sit with your walls. Then browse the grandmillennial collection and pick your two.