EMBRACE THE GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS PAST IN DECOR
What do you give someone who has everything? Attitude springs to mind. If that sounds too confrontational, try originality — through second-hand goods from thrift stores, online sites like Kijiji and vintage markets, decor expert Janette Ewen says.
“What I love about giving second-hand is you can give things to people that tell a story,” Ewen says. “Even if you write a little story about it and pop it in with the gift, it makes it all the more meaningful because it’s really wellthought-out. I have a friend who is a big designer in New York, so I went on Kijiji and bought about 10 ’60s and ’70s decor magazines, tied them in a bow, added a tag, and he said he reads them all the time.”
The same approach works for the holiday season, Ewen says.
“You can shop for a lot of vintage things, whether it’s serving pieces, ornaments and another thing too,” she says, admitting a bias for Kijiji. “If you want to flip out what you have and sell your old stuff and kind of refresh it, I’ve done that a lot with my decor, and sometimes it ends up coming out totally even, so whatever I sell, I can swap out my trends and it doesn’t cost me anything.”
Hunting for second-hand decor and gifts should be approached a little like a treasure hunt, she says.
“The first thing I always say, however you’re decorating, is to theme all of your Christmases and make it a different theme every year,” Ewen says.
“Last year, my Christmas was Paris in the 1920s. This year, I’m doing a mid-century modern 1950s Christmas, and then you can use a lot of what you have already. So if you’ve got a green garland, you could use it, but you could put mini Eiffel Towers in it, or in my case, you could do mid-century modern coloured balls.”
You can also run your decor theme through your food, she says.
“You can imagine if you were doing a 1950s Christmas, how much fun the food would be,” she says. “Even your invitations, the wrapping, all of that stuff, it kind of refreshes it — instead of sending your partner down to the basement to pick up the same ornaments and put them out, it adds that fun and flavour back into the holidays.”
Don’t be afraid to take chances with your decor this time of the year, she says. If something looks and feels right, give it a go — and think about simple DIY touches you can add to second-hand goods, like a quick spray-paint.
“If you’re a creative person, it just gets the creative juices flowing,” she says. “You might be looking for one thing and stumble across something else that’s magical.
“The year before last, I did a woodland Christmas, and I found this girl on Kijiji who did these hand-poured wolves and bear heads that you can put up on your wall, and then I contacted her, and was like, ‘Oh, can you do them in gold and silver for me?’ and she was like, ‘Sure.’”
Ewen says she ended up using these gold and silver animal heads last Christmas when decorating the boutique Niagara Falls, Ont., hotel The Old Stone Inn.
“We brought woodlands to life,” she says. “I wanted it to be rustic and a touch nostalgic.”
This year, she says, we’re seeing a lot of rose gold and mixed metallics in holiday decor.
Shopping second-hand is a great way to source local goods, and connect with local suppliers, she adds.
“I wanted to do a vintage bar recently for entertaining for the holidays, and I went to six different sellers, found all different vintage pieces, had everything shipped, and then it all comes in, and you have this amazing, eclectic-looking bar,” she says.
“It doesn’t look like you went to one store and bought everything there. You want your home to tell stories; I don’t want it to be like a showroom floor.”