Christmas “Lite”
Christmas Squirrel
Decorating for the holidays can be fraught. For all of you Holli’s and Greers out there, there are many of us who don’t look forward quite as eagerly to the decking of the halls. Whether you be grinchy (me), lazy (me?), time-crunched, budget slimmed, or emotionally triggered (also me) by the mandate to decorate, take heart, there is an easier way. This plan could be subtitled “Easy Peasy Big Box Minimalist Holiday Decorating”. Says the wordy maximalist.
My childhood holidays were idyllic so my parents are off the hook for this one. My grinchitude can be traced back to the burdensome sense that as a young mother of four children born within five years, the holidays seemed like a really BIG DEAL. My bandwidth and household budget were pretty slim. Also, I had to battle the tension of opposites: Do I let my little cherubs choose a tree (they wanted a puffer tree, read: tacky) and decorate it as they pleased or have a pretty tree (I wanted a skinny noble, read: tasteful, classy), decorated the way I wanted? Petty, perhaps, but the struggle was real. In my pragmatic heart-three-sizes-too-small mindset, I was exceedingly careful to set the bar as low as possible for fear that anything cool that was implemented might unwittingly become a “tradition” that I would then have to include every year from then on. Ya, that’s just too much work. The other thing for me was that although I really loved all of the glowy, cozy christmas lights, the clutter started to get to me after a few weeks and I looked forward to taking that sh*t down the very day after Christmas so I could vacuum and have my space back.
This year I was definitely in the mood. Two years of weird or altogether missed holidays during Covid made me freshly grateful for my loved ones. I don’t want to take for granted these times to stop and “be” with the people I love. The day after Thanksgiving, as has been the tradition around here, we were set to go cut down our tree. We cleaned and tidied the living room and made space by removing a table and chairs. Then, surprise!, we really liked that empty space. We batted around the pros and cons of to tree or not to tree and decided to pass. What we love about the holiday decorations are: the glowy lights and the smell of freshly cut pine. Our solution: fresh cedar garlands (Costco) with lights (Target) around the large windows, on the mantle and outside on the deck, a few well positioned cute things like tiny fuzzy deer, extra large and silly red glowing ornaments, lighted paper star pendants (Ikea) and some divinely scented cedar balsam candles (Trader Joes). Just add a fire in the fireplace, Charlie Brown’s Christmas on the stereo and a cocktail and voila! Not so grinchy after all.
Post Script: It still took a good chunk of two days to get this accomplished! Turns out swagging garland across the deck rail is not a snap of the fingers exercise.
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