No need to squabble over over holiday decorating — you can blend old favourites with new looks.
Blend homey and modern, buy two trees
It’s amazing how a few glass orbs can cause such a kerfuffle.
To my husband, Christmas means hanging mismatched Popsicle stick mice and eyeless teddy bears on the tree. It means chipped nutcrackers and faded, mismatched stockings from his youth. To him, the colours of Christmas are reds, blues, greens and golds. And purples. And oranges. And pinks. And … you get the idea.
For me, Christmas is a creative time. It’s the one time a year I feel motivated to embrace my inner Martha Stewart, to wave a wand over my living room and transform it into a designer winter wonderland. It means glittery balls, glass ornaments and luxe ribbons. It means expressing the most beautiful aspects of winter — the frosted windowpanes, the shimmer of an untouched slab of snow, the icicles — through a unified colour scheme of whites, silvers and greys.
The other day, my husband and I stood in front of the tree, arms crossed, unwavering. He called my decor tastes generic. I called his scattered.
Cue the annual Christmas conundrum.
Brenda Brix and Michelle Pollock, interior designers from AMR Designs, say the fight over traditional versus designer Christmas decor is a common one faced by many households. My husband and I aren’t the only ones to stand our ground on our different perspectives, on which decorations deserve to be displayed and which ones should be banished to the basement.
Brix and Pollock often experience the tension between homey and formal, handmade and store-bought in their own homes. They’ve also been called into the homes of friends to play the negotiator, helping to strike a balance during what’s supposed to be the most joyful time of the year.
“This is your time when you can just really go all out and have a lot of fun and make it glamorous,” Pollock says of those who embrace Christmas to flex their designer muscles and use their home as a canvas for expression. “And this is the time of year when people entertain a lot, so they want their house to look extra special because there are more people coming and going.”
Brix says many individuals wish to tap into a unified look that designer trends and styles offer. Reality, however, means that many families — especially those with kids — tend to acquire ornaments painted and sculpted by tiny hands, or that have been given as gifts (think “Baby’s First Christmas”). These objects can follow individuals all their lives, bringing back memories of friends, family and get-togethers.
Chris Standring, who has been leading holiday decor workshops at Christmas in November at the Jasper Park Lodge for the past 22 years, says there are conflict-free ways to deck the halls using both traditional and contemporary ornaments and accents.
One option is to put up two Christmas trees.
“We would have a formal tree in the living room that was my tree and nobody touched it,” Standring laughs. “And we had a family tree in our family room, which was a less formal space.”
Standring says kids would decorate the informal Christmas tree however they wanted, with whatever tinsel and trinkets they wanted.
If two trees aren’t feasible, however, even the most frayed, chipped and lopsided decorations can be made to look unified and expensive.
“People get very caught up in making a magazine look, but if you look closely at a lot of the magazine (homes), there are some with homemade elements brought in,” Brix says. “It’s just a matter of we tend to see the flaws in it when we think designer. But really, in any design, harmony and repetition is what pulls it together.”
Standring says you could follow a specific colour scheme or theme with your traditional ornaments, choosing to put out sentimental items that are a certain colour or style for example. Or you can load up the tree with a multitude of mismatched ornaments and add single colours of ribbon, bows or garland to bring them all together.
To carry the look throughout the rest of the house, Brix and Pollock recommend creating little vignettes with other traditional ornaments and accents in other rooms. Traditional multicoloured lights, for example, can be given a modern twist if they’re placed in a large vase or jar and used as a centrepiece.
A beautiful home might be on your Christmas wish list this season, but Standring says that harmony and compromise should be at the top. She says you can easily find beauty in handmade and traditional decor items from your childhood, which can bring you comfort come Christmastime.
“Designer looks come and go, but what lasts are those memories. The symbols of those memories, that’s what keeps Christmas alive.”