My brother Ahmed’s balcony is the size of a bed sheet. I have measured it the way brothers measure things, which is to say I lay down on it once, on a dare, in June, and my feet hung over the railing side and my head touched the wall, and Ahmed said “bass, proof ho gaya” and took a photograph that he still threatens me with. Two metres by one and a half, if you want numbers instead of a photograph of me looking like a fool. On that balcony, before December, lived three things: a drying rack, a plastic chair with one cracked leg, and a money plant in a paint tin that Ahmed was killing slowly and with great consistency. That winter, christmas balcony decor ideas began on that very balcony.
The chair is where this story starts, because in the first week of December Ahmed came home from his shift and found the cat from the second floor asleep on it. Not on the good part. On the cracked part, arranged like a queen. “She has moved in,” he told me on the phone. “Rent nahi deti, bas so jaati hai.” The cat is called Billi by the whole building, which is not a name, it is a description, and she answers to it the way cats answer, which is when she feels like it. Ahmed carried the chair inside that night — this matters later — and the balcony stood empty for the first time since he moved in, and he stood in the doorway looking at the empty bed sheet of a balcony and said the sentence that costs men like us money every single year. “Is par kuch lag sakta hai.” The empty balcony that night was the first hint that christmas balcony decor ideas could give the flat a room it never had.
He meant Christmas. He meant, specifically, that his office colleague had sent a photograph of a balcony in some cold country, all lights and blankets, and Ahmed had looked at his own two metres and thought: why not mine.
Christmas Balcony Decor Ideas: Rs 1,000, Announced Like a Government Figure
Saturday we went to the bazaar. I want the record to show I went as an advisor and came home as a labourer, which is the standard arrangement. Ahmed’s budget, announced in the rickshaw like a government figure, was one thousand rupees, not a rupee more, and he said it twice so the bazaar would hear and behave. The lights were the fight. The shop man — Saleem, thin, quick, a man who has sold lights to three generations — first showed us the plug-in strings, long and warm and Rs 500, and Ahmed nearly paid before I asked the question that is now written on my heart from my sister’s flat and its famous tree: bhai, plug kahan lagega? Ahmed’s balcony has no socket. The only socket is inside the room, which means a wire through the window, which means the window never fully shuts, which means December air all night and also — Ahmed remembered this in the shop, out loud, to his own horror — Rashid sahab. His landlord. Rashid sahab has a rule about wires, born from an incident in 2019 involving a previous tenant, a water pump and a smell of burning that the whole floor remembers like a festival. No wires out of windows. It is in the agreement. Ahmed has read the agreement, because Rashid sahab made him read it out loud, standing up, on the day he moved in. I went along as an advisor, but the bazaar quickly turned into a crash course in christmas balcony decor ideas on a tight budget.
Battery Lights, Because of 2019
So: battery lights. Two strings, Rs 300 each, warm white, each running on three pencil cells. Saleem bhai wrapped them in newspaper and said, “Cells alag se lene parein ge,” with the air of a man closing a door. The cells cost Rs 150 for a strip, and Ahmed stood there doing the arithmetic of a man watching a budget get murdered in a bazaar, and said the line I have since stolen for my own life: “Budget gaya, magar balcony reh gaya.” The budget is gone, but the balcony remains. We also bought four small glass jars at Rs 25 each from the crockery lane — the lane where everything is displayed like it will break if you look at it, and some of it does — for candles he already had at home, half-burned, in a drawer, the way candles live in every bachelor’s house I have ever entered, waiting for a load-shedding that justifies them. Two strings of warm battery lights were the backbone of our christmas balcony decor ideas, simple and cheap to run.
Total: Rs 850. Under budget. Ahmed walked home like a finance minister.
One Metre Short
Sunday evening we hung the lights and immediately discovered what the photographs never tell you: a string of lights is sold by length and a railing is measured by hope. The first string did the long side and half the short side. The second string did the other short side and reached — I am not inventing this — one metre short of closing the loop. One metre of bare railing, at eye level, exactly where a man sits. We stood looking at it. “Teesri string?” Ahmed said. “Cells phir se?” I said. The bare metre stayed bare. It stays bare today. Visitors assume it is a design. It is not a design, it is Rs 300 and a strip of cells we refused to buy, and I have decided this is the most honest decoration in either of our homes: you can see exactly where the money ran out. That short string is still the best of our christmas balcony decor ideas. The shortfall taught us that good christmas balcony decor ideas start with measuring, not with shopping.
The Drying Rack Eviction
The drying rack was the second war, and it is the war every small balcony in the world will recognise. A balcony that dries clothes cannot also be a Christmas postcard, not in two metres. The rack came inside — onto a folding stand in the corner of his room, where it now stands like a grey animal — and it will stay there till January, and Ahmed’s shirts dry two feet from his bed, and he has made his peace with sleeping next to his own laundry the way he made his peace with the cat. Something had to trade. In my sister’s flat it was the calendar and the photographs that moved for the wall tree. In Ahmed’s it is the laundry. A small home does not add a festival. It swaps for one. Nobody selling lights will ever tell you this, because “first, evict your drying rack” does not move stock. Moving the laundry out was the hardest part, yet it is what makes christmas balcony decor ideas work in flats like ours.
The plant, you will ask. The plant got promoted. The paint tin went into a corner, the money plant got its longest vine unwound and draped along the railing through the lights, and Ahmed watered it — I witnessed this, I would swear to it — for the first time since October. “Christmas mein to paani milna chahiye,” he said, absolutely serious, and the plant, which has survived a year of his care, will probably survive being loved too.
Rain, in Four Small Buckets
Monday it rained. Not the dramatic kind — the sideways, spitting kind that finds every gap. Ahmed called me at ten. “Jars mein paani bhar gaya.” The candle jars had collected the rain like four small buckets, because a jar on an open balcony in December rain is not a candle holder, it is a rain gauge. We tipped them out on Tuesday, dried them on the same cursed drying stand, and the candles moved into the jars only on the evenings he actually sat out — which became the rule without anyone announcing it: the balcony is dressed in fifteen minutes, nightly, like a shop opening. Lights on (battery switch, one click each), jars out, blanket over the chair that came back from inside — the good chair, the room chair, carried out every evening and carried back every night, past the drying rack, in a small daily parade that Billi watches from the doorway with the expression of a building inspector who has seen this before and approves of none of it. The rain tested everything, and only the sturdiest christmas balcony decor ideas survived a sideways December shower.
And she got her seat back in the end. The cracked chair — the one this whole story started with — came back out on the Wednesday, because two people cannot share one chair and a man does not sit on the floor of his own balcony in December, and Billi inspected it and chose, with a cat’s total freedom in these matters, the good chair, in the blanket, leaving Ahmed the cracked one. He sat in it. “Demotion,” he said. He stayed an hour. Getting her seat back felt right, because the best christmas balcony decor ideas leave room for the life already there.
The Room the Flat Did Not Have
Here is what I did not expect, and I am writing it down because nobody believes it about small places: the balcony became the room the flat did not have. Ahmed eats his dinner out there now, plate on his knees. He takes his phone calls there. Our mother, on a video call on the Friday, was shown the balcony — Ahmed carrying the phone around like a news reporter, the lights, the jars, the bare metre, all of it — and she was quiet for a moment and said, “Ab ye ghar lag raha hai.” Now it feels like a home. She has visited that flat four times and slept on a mattress on its floor and never once said it felt like a home. Two strings of battery lights did what furniture could not, and I think I know why, and it is the same reason my sister’s flat worked with a tree made of light on a wall: the festival is not the size of the thing. It is whether a person can sit inside it. Ahmed can sit. Billi can sit. Two chairs, one metre of bare railing, and a plant getting its first proper drink since October. Those are the simplest christmas balcony decor ideas to start with. Nobody believed a bed-sheet balcony could feel like a room, but that winter proved them wrong.
Leave the Last Metre Bare
So if your balcony is the size of a bed sheet, start with the socket question before the bazaar, the way my sister’s tree taught us to start with the door. Battery lights if the landlord’s agreement has a 2019 in it. Warm white, not the blinking colours — a balcony is too close to the eye for a disco. Move the drying rack without a ceremony and let it stand in your room like furniture until January. Candles in jars, but only on the nights you sit out, unless you are collecting rain as a hobby. And leave the last metre bare if the money runs out. Somebody who loves you will look at the whole glowing railing and never once see the gap. The ones who see the gap will point it out, and you will say, “Rs 300 ka gap hai,” and that will be the truest sentence spoken on that balcony all winter. For more background on the tradition, see this guide to Christmas decorations.