Tuesday, the box came down. That is where these Christmas home decor ideas really began.
It lives in the cupboard under the stairs, behind the vacuum, and it smells of dust and last year’s tinsel. It had rained since lunch. The windows were fogged by five. I put the box on the living room rug, cut the tape, and found the lights in their usual state, which is to say a knot with bulbs in it. Twenty minutes I sat there. Twenty full minutes, picking at a wire knot like it was a puzzle in a Christmas cracker, while the dead half of one strand lay dark no matter what I wiggled.
At nine my phone lit up. Amina, my sister: “Saturday. Us and the kids. Don’t go mad decorating, it’s only family.”
Only family. I looked at the knot, the dark strand, the plain tired room, and typed back: “Too late.”
Wednesday: ribbon, a ladder, and Mrs. Parkar
Wednesday I went to buy one thing. One. The shop on the corner had a wall of ribbon and I stood in front of it too long, the way you do, and the assistant — young, maybe nineteen, wearing a Santa hat because the manager made him — watched me pick up the wide gold roll for the third time.
“Take the thin plaid one,” he said. “The wide one shouts at the door.”
He was right, too. The plaid cost $9 and the gold stayed on the wall. At home I wired three pinecones into the wreath first — pinecones off the pavement on my morning walk, free, still a bit damp — and hung the whole thing dead centre on the front door at eye level, and stepped back onto the path to admire it, and it was wrong. It floated. A wreath at eye level doesn’t greet anybody; it inspects them. Up the ladder I went, six inches higher, then six inches again, until the middle of it sat somewhere around five and a half feet and the door stopped looking accused.
The ribbon went on crooked. I tied it three times and it went on crooked three times, slightly left, like it had somewhere to be.
“The left side’s dropping,” Mrs. Parkar called over the fence, not even pretending she hadn’t been watching. “It’s waving at me.”
“Let it wave,” I said, and left it. She laughed and went in, and the wreath is still waving now, a week later, and two people have knocked and mentioned it, both kindly. That is the entryway, start to finish: a wreath hung too high on purpose, a $9 ribbon tied badly, and pinecones I didn’t pay for. If your own hall is the size of a wardrobe — and mine nearly is — do even less. A jar on the step with a battery candle in it. Done. The door does the rest.
Thursday
Thursday I measured the living room window wrong and bought a strand of lights that ended exactly one window short of where it needed to end, the last bulb hanging in a dark gap like it had given up on the whole project. I unplugged it, went to bed annoyed, and woke up still annoyed, which is how I knew the strand would have to live somewhere else.
Friday, the Tree: Christmas Home Decor Ideas
Friday was the tree, and the tree is never a small job, whatever the box says. Six feet, artificial, bought in a January sale four years ago for about $60, and it leans. It has always leaned. Not over — just a tilt, a lean of maybe two inches at the top, so the star sits at an angle like it’s listening for something in the next room. This year I stopped pretending I would fix it properly and propped the stand on two books: a fat cookbook with a broken spine and my old school atlas, the one with countries in it that don’t exist anymore. Two books. The tree is straight for the first time in four years and standing on a geography lesson to do it.
The lights took the rest of the afternoon. A six-foot tree wants about 300 lights if you like it bright, and I like it bright, so there I was on a chair with three strands and the Thursday strand — the one that was one window too short for the window turned out to be exactly right for the bookshelf later, but for the tree it was strand number three, and yes, I counted bulbs standing on a chair in my socks, and yes, that is a stupid way to spend a Friday, and no, I would not skip it.
The plain baubles go deep, near the trunk. I found that out reaching in after a dropped one: inside the branches, a dull gold bauble I thought nothing of was catching the light and glowing like it cost money. Half the tree’s fullness is just cheap ornaments hiding in the dark, shining. The good ones — my grandmother’s two glass birds, the chipped red one from a market in — the good ones go at the edges where hands and eyes land. My grandmother did tinsel strand by strand, one at a time, an hour of it, and her tree used to glow like a shop window in the best way. I use a bead garland. I am lazier than my grandmother was. The tree does not seem to mind.
[I keep photos of the rooms that worked pinned under Homedecorbyglobwriters on Pinterest, because by next December I will remember none of this — not the books, not the bulb count, nothing. The photos are my memory. The house is just where it happens.]
Friday evening I lit the coffee-table candle early, to test it, and it smoked. A thin black thread of smoke, soot already greying the rim of the jar, because the wick was too long — scissors, a trim, relight, clean burn. I moved it away from the curtain side of the table anyway. Some lessons you only want to learn the cheap way. Then the clementines went into the blue bowl, a whole bag, about $5 at the Friday market, and the room changed more for that bowl than for anything else I’d done all week. Orange against green. The kids would eat half of them Saturday and that is not a flaw in the decorating, that is the decorating.
Saturday, late
Saturday the table had to seat eight people at a table built for six, which it does every year by elbows and optimism. Down the middle went the runner — a length of plain linen, $12, bought two years ago and never hemmed, the ends just cut and slightly fraying in a way I’ve decided is a style. Candles in jars, short ones, so nobody has to conduct a conversation over a flame. Greenery flat along the runner. Flat, because anything with height gets carried off to the sideboard by the second course and sits there like a guest who left early. One year I lettered place cards with a gold pen, an entire evening of it, and my uncle sat in the wrong seat on purpose because he liked the view. Now there is a chocolate on each plate instead of a card. No chocolate has ever been lost, misplaced, or sat in the wrong seat.
The bedroom got almost nothing and I mean it: one small wreath on the inside of the door and a candle on the dresser for the last hour of the night. There were lights round the headboard one year, beautiful for two nights, irritating every night after. They came down on the 27th and they are still in the box, in the knot, waiting to irritate me again next Tuesday.
By six the house was done, or done enough, which is the only done there is. Wreath waving. Tree on its books. The Thursday strand glowing along the bookshelf where it had belonged all along. Amina’s key scraped in the lock — she has a key, she lets herself in, she always has — and Rayan came in ahead of her with his shoes already off, seven years old and moving like the house owed him something. He stopped just inside the door. He lifted his nose the way you do outside a bakery.
“It smells like Christmas in here,” he said. For more Christmas home decor ideas, see this Christmas decoration guide.
Decorating a small flat instead? Read: One Room, One Tree on the Wall, and No Door Blocked
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