Christmas decor chaos
Last week, I bought myself a tea towel that says, “My housekeeping style is best described as: there appears to have been a struggle.” This is true not just of my housekeeping, but of my home decorating style in general.
I am what some people might call a “maximalist.” I adore all things sentimental, quirky and antique, and I have trouble getting rid of any of it for any reason. This might be why my kids have all learned the word “tchotchke” from a young age; they know what it is like to look across every room in the house and see an array of vintage kitchen scales, Russian nesting dolls, Depression-era glassware and silly tea towels.
But just because I’m a maximalist doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate a cool, calm and collected home when I see one. I visit the homes of friends who have uncluttered shelves with color-coded books and a few tasteful objets d’art thoughtfully placed here and there, and I think, “Wow, that is beautiful. This room feels so calm. I’d like to emulate that in my own home.”
And then I turn right around and cram a basket full of old magazines onto my bookshelf; decide to display my mom’s aqua-blue hair dryer from the 1960s; and fill the china cabinet with cake stands, board games and craft supplies.
During the holidays, when you take a house like mine – one that’s filled to the brim like a Country Living Magazine cover shoot from 1987– and then add in about nine boxes worth of Christmas decorations … hoo boy, you’ve got a real ho-ho-ho-hot mess on your hands.
This year, the Christmas decorating chaos started the day after Thanksgiving, when we went over the river and through the woods so we could cut down a tree that would make even Clark Griswold proud. Once we successfully manhandled the tree into our living room, it sat bare for a couple days until Logan declared it time for the dreaded Stringing of the Lights.
When I was a kid, we reserved this most odious of all Christmas chores as the one time each year when we would turn a blind eye if my mom let a curse word slip. Now that I’m a parent, I’m ashamed that we only allowed her just the one.
Stringing lights on a too-tall tree is a miserable, grumpy task, but Logan and I somehow made it through with our marriage still intact. While the kids got to work putting ornaments on the tree, I started sifting through boxes to remind myself exactly what I was dealing with in the Christmas decor department.
The answer is this: lots of garland, lots of glitter, about a million bottle brush trees that I can’t seem to quit and a towering stack of construction-paper Santas, cut-out poinsettias and handwritten Christmas poems that my kids have brought home from school throughout the years.
It is these school projects that bring the most clutter to our holiday decor, but that somehow also bring me the most joy. For lack of a better system, I just tape them all onto the living room wall; what started as a small array of handmade projects has now become a floor-to-ceiling situation. And the whole mess makes me happy every time I see it.
There’s the note pounded out on a vintage typewriter by 6-year-old Jane, declaring, “I love our Elf on the Shelf and the advent calendar and Christmas caroling and baking cookies and Christmas Eve. But I love spending time with the whole family the most.”
There’s the construction-paper Rudolph with antlers made from cut-out tracings of 4-year-old George’s hands. And there’s the handmade card where a barely-able-to-write Hyrum demands that Santa send him not one but two elves TONIGHT, and oh yeah, by the way, Merry Christmas.
I look at that wall and remember all the years we’ve had of magic, fun and togetherness at Christmastime, and it makes me smile. The masking tape holding everything up may start to fail about two weeks into the season, and it’s true that I’m dying to take the whole thing down by Dec. 26, but until then, I’d take that wall a million times over a carefully curated holiday tableau.
After all, Martha Stewart doesn’t live at our house, but a bunch of kids with holiday stars in their eyes do. And when it comes to picking who matters most, there’s no struggle at all.