"Sparkle, sparkle"...a Southern Belle's mantra and this Holiday Season's theme

Pretty pewter shimmer n' sparkle from a dress available at Belk

This sparkly combination comes as cuff links or earrings at Brooks Brothers

And more elegant-bling with this great ribbon-tie belt from Talbots

Finally...some sequined-top sparkling at college for a holiday season party

In the lexicon of all-things Southern Belle Preppy...one can never "sparkle" enough...whether literally or figuratively or in the active embellishment of one's environment.

As one of my favorite Christmas books quips, "Subtlety and gold aren't such good bedfellows below the Mason-Dixon line, where gold comes with a spray nozzle. What aerosol did for hair was nothing compared to what it's contributed to Christmas. Gold-painted trimmings have become the high hair of seasonal festivities." How utterly true! David C. Barnette is spot-on and oh so funny with his book titled, The Official Guide To Christmas In The South Or, If You Can't Fry It, Spraypaint It Gold. Published in 2004 and espied on a shelf in the darling local store we have here called Lulu Burgess where I picked it up, perused through a couple of pages, began chuckling under my breath and promptly took it up to the counter to purchase...this small tome has become a must-reread for me every holiday season since then.

Oh, us Southern Belle Preppies and our "sparkle", oh yeah! Just this week I've read a Facebook post by a sorority sister who's been sparkling a lot with her decor' decorating gigs going on, just this week Talbots is sporting its beautiful and so elegant "Glisten Up" holiday offerings and just this week married-couple friends of mine thought of me when they were in the Citadel Mall in Charleston looking around at all the glittering, sparkling Holiday decor' in the shops there. In the book, A Southern Belle Primer by Marilyn Schwartz, Chapter 3 is titled, "Learning to Sparkle" which details just a few of the ways n' means by which Belles sparkle aside from inherited diamonds, gold-gilded magnolia leaf wreaths and such.

Underlying and over-layering all of the traditional reds and greens and everything-in-betweens of this holiday season's fashion, home decor' and gifting is....sparkle!

A rich dusting of metallic glimmer in gold, silver, champagne, pewter, bronze, cameo and other pretty hues can be found almost wherever one turns their head to look. I'm much more of a subtle-sparkle kind of person now but obvious-sparkle has certainly been a part of my past:

The photo above proves this with a party-pic of James and I from a winter's Casino Party at college where I wore a festive Jester-top heavy in late 1980's sequin-styling. Lately I'm into the utilization of subtle-sparkle or a dash of outright bling with either real gems or gobs of faux but....neither of these enacted together. Sparkling does have its limits!

Other pictures above are from some of this season's sparkle-bling metallic inspirations which I think are really great interpretations-on-a-theme...

And so we sparkle, sparkle onwards through this autumn on into the holidays and winter!