SHE’S THE TANNEN-BOMB
Joyce Wilson and her daughter Lori-Ann Keenan get in the festive spirit on Monday in the living room of Wilson’s Richmond home. Wilson has 17 decorated Christmas trees in her house, including one in the master ensuite, as well as nine more outside.
Goose eggs and Santas in shiny tin cars, baubles of blown glass and custom-made stars; purses and apples and birds with red wings, these are a few of her favourite things.
These and so many others, all ornaments, all decorations on themed trees inside and outside Joyce Wilson’s Richmond home: twenty-six trees — 17 in, nine out — decorated for the season with unique ornaments she has collected over the years.
“If we’re in Europe, when others go to tour the churches and museums, I’m checking out Christmas decorations,” she said. “Most of these are one-of-a-kind, handblown glass from Germany. German ornaments are really lovely.”
There are fruits and vegetables decorating one tree; that’s the one voted most popular at an open house last weekend for 180 friends and employees at the family business, about 50 more people than they’d expected.
There is a tree with birds, another with 200 hand-painted decorations made out of egg shells, including a gorgeous goose egg that was hollowed out and carved before a one-inch-high trimmed tree was put inside it.
There’s a tree in the ground-floor bathroom decked out in shoes and purses; another in the master ensuite trimmed in white and gold, with reindeer in the tub.
“I assume everybody has a tree in the bathroom,” Wilson said. She was joking. Probably …
There’s even a “Charlie Brown tree” covered in all the decorations that didn’t fit the other 16 themes.
“I started collecting ornaments 40 years ago,” the 71-year-old said. “After I bought X amount of ornaments I had to buy another tree, then maybe another tree …”
Wilson and her husband Roger McKie own Dressew Supply, an iconic Hastings Street fabric store. A few of the decorations are stored in Dressew ’s warehouse, but most of Wilson’s 8,212 ornaments are stored in Rubbermaid bins in the sewing room of the couple’s 5,000-square-foot house.
(A teenage friend of the family counted the decorations, then Wilson’s daughter Lori-Ann Keenan recounted them for the openhouse door prize, awarded to whomever came closest to guessing the number of decorations; a 10-year-old boy came within 15, then donated half his $100 prize to the food bank.)
The trees in their big cardboard boxes and bulkier decorations go in the garage out back beside the pool, which of course is also decorated with a floating wreath and giant red and gold spheres.
“Lori-Ann made a big push for me to do this this year,” Wilson said. “I have done this for eight or 10 years and that was on a much smaller scale.”
Five male friends of Lori-Ann’s did the “bull work” of setting up the trees, then mother, daughter and 15 other women decorated the trees, one woman per tree.
“Some had never decorated a tree before, some don’t like Christmas very much, but we had a party, the Champagne flowed,” Wilson said.
She put out all her china Santa teapots and china candle holders, and her Christmas figurines and dolls, then had two interior decorators come and adorn the banisters, doors, window frames and fireplace.
Wilson loves the period leading up to Christmas, from the beginning of December until this time of the month.
“People are generally very happy before Christmas,” she said. “But the week before Christmas I find a lot of people get a bit depressed, not having family carol singalongs around the tree like on TV.
“I don’t know why I do all this other than I have the decorations and the few times I’ve done it — on a much smaller scale than this — people who have come over enjoyed it. It is excessive, for sure, but I’m not sure I’ll get the chance to do it again.”