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Christmas Mix of Past and Present

© Barbara Nicholson Bell

My home is an Arts & Crafts bungalow, located in the Northeast, and built in 1920. It's a later design than most of the Craftsman style homes that are common in my town, and may even be called "transitional" as it sits among many English-style cottages, gambrels, Queen Anne victorians, and American four-squares. Nonetheless, I am charmed by its brick fireplace, natural oak woodwork, built-ins and small but efficient floorplan.

Decorating for the holidays is always a challenge I love to face. This year's Christmas decorating has been rather greater a challenge than usual, however! This year, I must combine my own holiday decorations of 30 years' collecting with those of my husband's we brought from Alaska, and those I inherited from my mother who passed away last spring.

My mother, also an antiques dealer, went crazy at Christmas. Her home was a neighborhood delight this time of year, with a table-top tree in every room (including the teddy bears' room in the attic), and Victorian heirloom ornaments, several sets of ornate china and silver, and laces, velvets and damasks covering the furniture. My sisters and I divided the best of the decorations among us before the home was sold.

The ornaments brought from Alaska are more recent acquisitions, but are reproductions of several eras: blown glass balls and teardrops, velvet and gold-trimmed drums and drummers, papier-maché globes and hearts, and miniature wooden toys.

How to combine several "new" collections with my own, became the dilemma. I could cover an entire tree with just my collection of heart ornaments. There are also the wooden fruits, the gold musical instruments, the dated ornaments commemorating special occasions, and the faded, bent mementos of Christmases when my children were babies.

I sat among the boxes lamenting to my husband that this was an impossible task, especially as our tree this year is smaller than usual. But with a look around the room at its style, colors and structure, I realized it already held the clue: soft green walls, slightly darker green upholstery with gold and black colors in the accents, and spots of red in the art work, books, etc. Christmas-y!

Now I attacked the boxes with a mission: only gold-colored tiny lights, gold garlands (beads, wired stars, etc.) and gold or gold and red ornaments. Each collection revealed several gold ornaments, and many gold/red or plain red ones.

Now the tree holds ornaments as old as 75 years and others bought this year. There are red wooden