Cozy up your house for Fall and Winter

Cooler temps have arrived in the greater Cincinnati area, with low 70's and mid to high 60's forecast for the week. While drinking my coffee this morning, I was catching up on magazine reading, and saw all the wonderful, colorful Fall decoration ideas, and realized it's time to prepare our home for Fall, Winter and, amazingly enough, Christmas. I'd love to tell you all my insightful decorator-esque ideas about changing my house from Summer to Fall, but I'm neither that talented nor that rich. I do, however, have a few things I do each year to "cozy up" the house a bit. We have cream-colored leather furniture in our family room. (We have no kids or dogs!) These get rich dark red fitted slipcovers for the colder months. Is there anything more unfriendly in the winter than sitting on cold leather?! Light colored pillow covers are switched over to pillow covers in reds and golds. I have a piece of artwork over my mantel that is of a meadow, in Spring/Summer colors of orange, yellow, light greens. This gets moved to the basement, and eventually replaced with a quilt with a wreath motif. Until then I'll just fill in the mantel with a collection of candle holders and cream-colored candles. Though we don't use it often, I will clean our fireplace and put in some (real) logs and pine cones. The pine cones add a nice subtle scent to the room, and prepare your senses for the scents of the holidays! In our bedroom, I've dug out the cotton duvet cover to wash today and hang outside to dry. We have a gorgeous wool blanket that I put in the duvet cover, which will keep us snug throughout the winter, despite the fact that no matter how cold it is outside, we sleep with a fan in our window! I have a black wrought-iron candle-lier over the dining room table, and I have some pretty silk Fall leaves to entwine in the arms of the light. I'll add a Fall colored table cloth on top of the current cream-colored lace cloth. In the kitchen I simply add some Fall (pumpkin, leaves) motif dishtowels to hang on the handle of the stove, and some stoneware pumpkins to the shelves high over the kitchen windows in the Breakfast Nook. We have trees in our backyard that will soon develop some lovely red berries, and this year I plan on cutting some to place in a big stoneware pitcher on my kitchen table. Lastly, I will go to the local garden store this week and pick up two or three pots of mums for the front porch, and in mid-October add a few pumpkins as well. (These pumpkins will NOT be cut, as I will later use them to make pumpkin puree for the freezer!) I'm not a hot weather person, having been born and brought up in New England, so I always look forward to this time of year and the cooler (and colder) weather. I have visions of soups and stews and homemade pumpkin breads dancing in my head, Christmas gift lists starting to take form, and I'm ready to snuggle up with Jeff to get through the upcoming cold winter nights!