How To Build A Timeless Christmas, One Decoration At A Time
Buy once, unpack for years: Christmas decorations that won’t date.
Buy the tree once, let the decorations collect stories and leave the yearly Christmas makeover to the shop windows — the best festive pieces should look better with a few Decembers behind them.
Last Christmas, “Ralph Lauren Christmas” was all over our feeds: tartan ribbon, red velvet, dark green, polished silver, old glass, huge trees and rooms glowing as though somebody had turned the dimmer switch down purely for the sake of atmosphere. It looked expensive, obviously, but what people seemed to fall for was the familiarity of it all. This was Christmas as we already knew it — just with better lighting and considerably less wrapping paper on the floor.
“The best Christmas decorations become part of the memory, not just the room.”
Christmas is probably the only time we actively want to be predictable. Nobody is asking for a radical rethink of the family stockings. We want the same songs, the same food and the decorations we remember unpacking last year. And once you become the person hosting, with children of your own, you start to understand why. You remember how exciting it felt when somebody else made Christmas appear for you, and suddenly you are the one carrying the boxes downstairs. You want your children searching for the decoration they loved last year, knowing exactly where their stocking hangs and feeling that peculiar December combination of familiarity and anticipation — all the things they know are coming, and everything this Christmas might still bring.
Buy The Things Christmas Has Already Made Timeless
If you want Christmas to still look right years from now, borrow from the bits we have loved for generations. Deep red, forest green, tartan, brass, silver, glass, velvet, candlelight, natural wood and greenery with enough movement to look as though it might actually have grown somewhere. Push them richer and you have that Ralph Lauren warmth; strip them back to paper stars, pale wood, simple brass and evergreen and the mood becomes quieter, more Scandinavian. The styling changes, the feeling does not.
If you are going faux with the tree, this is the piece to get right. It takes up more visual space than almost anything else in the room and, looked after properly, should be with you for years. Look for a generous shape, varied branches and enough depth that it still looks convincing before the first bauble goes on. The White Company is our first stop for the kind of full, classic tree that should still be earning its annual trip down from the loft long after you have forgotten what you paid for it.
Greenery deserves the same scrutiny. A wreath or garland looks infinitely better when the foliage has movement to it — branches falling slightly differently, leaves turning at odd angles, nothing sitting too stiffly or symmetrically. The Suffolk Nest does exactly this sort of faux greenery: the kind that can soften a mantel, trail down a staircase or fill a doorway without immediately announcing itself as plastic. More importantly, it is the sort you will actually want to store properly and bring back out next year.
Then come the pieces that give a room a little theatre. Garden Trading’s hanging stars, bells and larger decorative shapes can completely change a hallway, dining room or window without demanding that the rest of the house follow a “theme”. We have a soft spot for anything that does the work of twelve smaller decorations in one go, and there is something wonderfully old-fashioned about a large star glowing in a window at Christmas.
For the quieter side of the season, Ferm Living makes a very convincing case for paper, brass, wood and simple shapes with plenty of space around them. It is a useful reminder that timeless does not have to mean tartan and velvet everywhere. Zara Home sits neatly between the two worlds and is always worth checking for glass, metal, candleholders and decorations that look considered without requiring a household ban on children going within three feet of the tree.
Let The Tree Get Better Every Year
A tree should not look as though its entire personality arrived in one delivery. Start with enough glass, ribbon and classic shapes to give it some rhythm, then let the interesting pieces accumulate. The ornament picked up on holiday. The one a child chose that would never have survived your own edit. The handmade creation held together by an alarming amount of glue. These are usually the ones everybody looks for first.
Then, every so often, buy one that feels genuinely special. Liberty is difficult to beat for this: the ornament you deliberate over, wrap rather more carefully than seems reasonable in January and feel absurdly pleased to rediscover the following December. Fortnum & Mason brings a little more theatre and humour, Nkuku is lovely for handmade glass with character, while Anthropologie is where we look when the tree needs something slightly eccentric to stop the whole thing becoming too tasteful.
There should always be room for the new. Buy the ridiculous lobster bauble if it makes you laugh. Cover the tree in enormous bows one year because you suddenly love them. Add something every Christmas. The point is simply to give those new arrivals a backdrop that will still make sense when the trend that inspired them has disappeared.
Over time, the decorations stop being a collection of things you bought and start keeping track of the years for you. A first Christmas, a new house, something brought home from a trip, the year a child was finally tall enough to decorate the top branches without being lifted. Then December comes around, the boxes come down again, and somebody insists that one particular decoration absolutely has to go where it always goes. That is the Christmas collection worth building.
