Jule Tide

Christmas Decorating Ideas: Keeping it Simple

September 2nd, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed

Christmas: Make It Sparkle–225 Simple Crafts, Food & Decorating Ideas for Your Holiday Home

Price: $14.97 USD

Keeping Christmas Simple

We are entering my favourite time of year. All the local stores are beginning to rev up their motors in time for the Christmas season. It always seems that each year shops begin their displays earlier, but perhaps it would be truer to say that as you get older Christmas seems to creep up on you and catch you unawares. However, some major stores begin to introduce holiday themes and Christmas decorating ideas in late summer, and by September they have certainly finished doing their planning. It is easy to get carried away by the whole thing. Personally, I like to keep simple. I try to bear this in mind when I do everything from Christmas decorating ideas to the foods I prepare for guests.

The Old Party

For several years my wife and I would hold an open house at Christmas. We invited co-workers, neighbours, friends and relatives. Each year the list of people we invited would grow in line with the headaches and stress of getting ready for the event. I began baking homemade goodies a month in advance. We made homemade sweets, cookies, pastries and a wide variety of finger foods. I would comb the magazines and stores to come up with the latest Christmas decorating ideas so that each year I would have a new spread of goodies for our guests to experience. We would have so many people in the house that you could hardly move, let alone admire the Christmas décor that my wife and I had come up with. We spent all of our time filling punch bowls, making coffee and replenishing serving platters. We decided that we needed to have a different way to celebrate the holidays with friends.

The Spirit Of Christmas: Creative Holiday Ideas Book 19 (Spirit of Christmas)

Price: $3.60 USD

Less is More

We looked at the list of people that we invited and agreed that we could eliminate co-workers from the list. We each had holiday parities at work where we could celebrate Christmas. We then decided that we would have smaller gatherings on three different evenings approaching Christmas Eve. This is how we started to keep things simple. We started inviting neighbours over for one evening, friends for another and relatives on another.

The New Party

Now we only serve appetizers and drinks. I still make a variety of homemade goodies, but now I have a cookie exchange with co-workers at our house. This gives me time with co-workers outside the working environment (I’ve discovered that some of them are almost human) and the party gets a wide variety of cookies. I still come up with different Christmas decorating ideas, and with fewer people in the house you can actually see the displays instead of concentrating on not bumping into them and knocking them over. I focus on decorating the trees well. We place one in the living room and one in the family room. I also have candles and greenery arranged on the tables. I also like to use large vases filled with a variety of evergreens along with red and white carnations. The Danes are wild about candles. The first time my mother visited she saw all the candles in the neighbouring windows as we walked along my street and she asked me if there had been a power cut. So, I add a few candles so the room dances in the light of living flame and my Christmas decorating is complete.

You are welcome to use this article on your web-site or blog as long as the resource box and the links it contains remain intact.

Eoin Beckett is a freelance author and editor. Although he stems from Ireland, he currently lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. Read more about Christmas Decorating Ideas at Juletide - the ancient and magical word for Christmas.