Content creator Lucy Kalice is one of Ideal Home's new Open House contributors, sharing her thoughts on cleaning, home decor and making the most of small spaces. See the rest of her articles here.
Here’s the thing: I love Christmas as much as the next person. What’s not to love about the most magical time of the year? But a lot of the reasons I like Christmas comes down to tradition. Tradition in family arrangements, tradition in Christmas parties, traditions in yummy food. I’ll admit that my family are quite passionate about tradition because in all my 29 years of life, we have never not spent Christmas Day at my parents' house. It would simply not feel like Christmas if we went anywhere else!
And for me Christmas traditions even go as far as the Christmas tree decorations. Every year we put up the same tree decorations and I love it. There’s something so nostalgic about it and it fills me with so much joy and excitement. We always opt for a red theme with hints of gold and silver which I think is a classic look.
Last year we mixed things up by adding some bows onto the tree from red ribbon cut offs and I loved it…but that’s as far as I’ll go with mixing things up. So I’ll tell you why I’m a creature of habit and spoiler alert, it’s not because I’m not creative enough to think of new colour schemes.
Decorating for Christmas and putting the Christmas tree up fills me with fond memories of doing it as a child with my mum. My parents normally have three Christmas trees, two inside the house and one outside. The two trees inside have different themes with decorations they have collected over the years. I remember we would even have chocolates hanging on the tree which come to think of it, I never see anyone doing anymore…
So now that I have my own home and I have my own Christmas tree, it excites me that I can build up my own collection of decorations. We’ve collected decorations each year and now when we get them out we go down memory lane remembering where we got some of them from. Some have been given to me by my mum from her collection, some are quirky and definitely don’t fit with the theme but they have a memory attached to them of where we bought them. Obviously these ones go at the back so they don’t ruin the aesthetic.
By sticking to the same colour theme each year, it means we can build our collection with decorations which have memories to them. It makes it feel more special, more traditional.
Now don’t get me wrong, I do love a different colour scheme for trees and I will ogle over them on social media and in garden centres. There are colour schemes that I never would’ve thought of like orange and brown or blue and silver. I think the candy cane style trees are absolutely brilliant, the supersized decorations with the red and white colours look like something out of The Grinch!
There is no doubt that they all look absolutely beautiful. I like the idea of mixing up the tree each year but I also think it seems a bit wasteful to buy a whole new set of tree decorations, which aren’t cheap, for just one year. Because if you keep changing the theme each year then you won’t get to use them again!
Maybe if I had more than one Christmas tree in my house I would be tempted by a trend, but right now, I only have space for one and that one is filled with sentimental decorations.
So are you a same Christmas tree decorations every year kind of person like me? Or do you like to mix it up each year?
