THE 10-MINUTE HOLIDAY MANTEL
May I present to you the 10-Minute Mantel.
Maybe you’ve reached the point in the holiday decorating marathon where you’ve run out of ideas and money. Yet there’s the fireplace mantel just begging for some glossy lifestyle magazine hocuspocus. My solution is to rummage in the garden, root around in the basement and make a run to the garden centre. If you want the scheme to have a botanical theme, then those three destinations should have suitable supplies.
At the garden centre, I head for the $3.99 tropical tables. Paw through the leafy selection and it’s easy to find handsome filler plants for the mantel-scape. Most of the plants have interesting variegation or splashes or veining, so they do more than just look green.
Scout around for smaller flowering plants like poinsettias, cyclamen and Christmas cactus; they look good on the mantel without overpowering the design. I bring them home, liberate them from their tiny plastic pots and relocate them to terra cotta containers. For many years I collected interesting small pots when I travelled. They make any plant look better and are attractive enough to display when empty.
From the garden, I scrounge what I can. Oakleaf hydrangea yielded pretty leaves, still clinging to their branches — this is a trend among many woody plants this year. I harvested some ornamental grass seed heads, sedum, and the beautiful seed pods of baptisia. That material from the garden goes into small vases without any water.
I don’t have a garden that yields an abundance of dried decorative plant bits, but nearby I can collect the red seedheads of sumac and fallen pine cones — good stuff that I have already used outside in window boxes.
For about $10 or $12 you can scoop up a nice bunch of magnolia branches, useful to display in a vase, as I did on the mantel or draped like a garland. They last a long time and have that beautiful contrast of shiny green on top and suede-like brown on the underbelly of the leaf.
In the basement, I came across a big batch of what looks like deer moss that I’d saved in plastic bags that still retained its colour. The moss got tucked around the clay pots on the mantel to give it a more gardenesque finish. I also pressed into service the potting mixture for orchids; it’s like tiny wood chips, and is an attractive way to topdress potting soil for a cleaner look.
The final touch: a string of tiny LED lights, miraculously still working after last year’s holiday extravaganza. I snaked them around the pots, where they warm up the terra cotta and shine a bit of uplight on the plants.
So there you have it: a fast and thrifty Christmas mantel. It should age well throughout December. There’s a pot of paperwhites on it that will likely run out of gas before long, but it’s easy to make substitutions.
It’s also likely we will soon see poor amaryllis for sale; they will have busted out of their boxes looking for light. Just bring them home and ease them back into an upright position to take their place on the 10-Minute Mantel.