I know the secret to holiday decorating
I had a revelation this week: I’ve been doing Christmas decorating all wrong.
My entire hoard of Christmas décor fits in three totes. One is reserved for ornaments. The other two contain a jumble of miscellaneous items—among them three or four strands of lights that don’t work, a Father Christmas figurine with a head injury, and a faux garland with a bad case of mange. (I need to do some purging one of these years.)
Every year, I randomly set out what’s left on any available surface, like I’m getting ready to hold a holiday tag sale. When I’m finished, I have a vaguely festive home, one that looks like it belongs to a family who lost most of their Christmas stuff in a cross-country move and never bothered to get more.
This year, I want to do better. I want to lean so hard into holiday decorating that arriving guests break into spontaneous wassailing.
I have no interior design skills, however, so I turned to the internet for inspiration. Why did I wait so long?
“All these years, my creativity has been hampered by one shortcoming: my crippling practicality.”
The Christmas decorations I do have are a recurring array of items that I like, that have sentimental value, or that I haven’t had the heart to throw away. (Not coincidentally, this is also the cheapest way to decorate.)
But I learned online that I’m supposed to choose a theme, like “coastal Christmas” or “Scandinavian Christmas.” Color themes are also popular—anything but red and green; they’re too on the nose.
I could go with “blue Christmas,” for instance, with a sapphire-colored flocked tree and cool-white LED lights that cause hypothermia on sight. Or “beige Christmas,” a neutral trend that says, “What we need at the darkest time of year is even less color.”
One website suggested going with the Pantone Color of the Year. For 2024, that’s Peach Fuzz. I’m sorry, but a Santa doll in a peach-colored suit is going to look like a jolly nudist. Not only does that not strike me as right for Christmas, it also might be inappropriate for children.
I needed more than a color theme; I needed a new way to think about holiday decorating. Then I landed on a magazine website that, with one photograph, revealed the secret to a beautiful Christmas home. It had never occurred to me, yet it was so obvious.
The image showed a mudroom with a “pastel Christmas” theme, which I guess is for people who think what’s missing from Christmas is Easter. But the theme is irrelevant.
The mudroom had a built-in bench with five open cubbies above and below. In each upper cubby hung a single faded stocking. On the bench lay a smattering of artfully arranged gifts in shades of after-dinner mints. And in each lower cubby stood a single pair of brand new, pastel-colored mud boots. It was, from an aesthetic standpoint, lovely.
But the caption held the key. It read, “Swap out the kids’ backpacks and coats for this clever alternative to hanging stockings from the mantel.”
Ingenious!
Sure, I was confused at first. I mean, where do the backpacks and parkas go? Anyone who has a family understands the tons of clothing and athletic gear and footwear that pile up in the winter months. Add Christmas guests and their coats and scarves and hats and boots, and you’d need a storage unit to hold all the belongings that would have to be off-loaded to create room for a tableau like this.
But that was just it! All these years, my creativity has been hampered by one shortcoming: my crippling practicality. It’s not just that I don’t want to spend tons of money on decorations, it’s also that I didn’t know that Christmas décor needed its own dedicated space.
Until I saw that mudroom photo, I had assumed that we could both decorate the house for Christmas and live in it—at the same time.
I’m such a dope.
This year, I’m going to do it right: I’ll go all out on some theme, put our belongings in storage and book us a hotel room for December.
It won’t be the messy, homey, low-budget kind of holiday season we’re used to, but for once the house is going to look like a perfectly curated magazine spread.
In the end, isn’t that what Christmas is all about?
✦ ✦ ✦
(Originally published in the Addison Independent November 2024)
