It's no secret that I love decorating Christmas trees. My mom was very much into Christmas decorations when I was growing up, and after she died, I slowly started my collection of decorations that has now grown to several trees, garlands, wreaths, centerpieces, and more.
Since it's just my husband and me at home, there are times when I wish others could get the joy out of the decorations like I did when I was a kid. Don't get me wrong: I decorate my house because I enjoy it, not for others. But after hours and hours of love, labor, and glitter, I sometimes think it would be great to share it with more people. I also enjoy coming up with new trees every year, but there is a finite limit to how many trees I can put in my house… and we're definitely close to reaching it!
Late last year, I heard about an event here in Louisville called the Festival of Trees and Lights. It's a showcase of holiday decorations up for sale or auction, with proceeds benefiting Norton Children's Hospital. I'm not a professional designer so I wasn't sure I could participate, but after a few emails, was invited to decorate a 7-foot Christmas tree. I was so excited to donate the supplies and time to design a tree (which they supplied!).
The Festival is this weekend at Slugger Field. If you're local and want to go, you can buy tickets on their website. You can also view and bid on items online at that same site.
How I Designed this Christmas Tree
I only had about 5 days to figure out what kind of tree I wanted to design. The trees in my home are generally designed around fairly specific themes. My goal with this tree was to be traditional enough that it would appeal to a wide variety of people, and also special enough so that people would think it was well designed and worth bidding a higher price on. I want it to raise the most money possible for Norton Children's Hospital! I also wasn't sure what color tree I would have: green, white, or green with flocking – so I needed something that would work on all of them.
With this in mind, I decided to base the design around whatever 4″ ribbon I found that I hoped would appeal to many people. I went to my favorite local(ish) shop for holiday decor, which is House by JSD. I say local(ish) because they're in Lexington, but it's where I've bought the majority of my higher-quality decorations throughout the years. I already was planning on visiting House for to add to my personal collection, so it was perfect timing.
I found a pretty plaid high-quality 4″ ribbon, and some coordinating 2.5″ ribbon. As I continued browsing the store, I found a tree that had some fun elements that I knew I could use on this tree. Swirly/curly glitter picks that were the same green and red in the ribbons.
Christmas Tree Ingredients for Winter Whimsy:
On Instagram Stories, some of you mentioned wanting to see how this tree was put together from start to finish. Let's start with ingredients!
Standard tree elements that I usually use: ribbon, floral picks/stems, and shatterproof balls. The ratio of each can be switched up depending on what you want your emphasis to be. I leaned pretty ribbon-heavy in this one.
For this 7.5 foot white flocked pre-lit tree, I used:
- 100 yards of ribbon:
- 36 picks/stems
- 8 swirl red glitter picks from House
- 8 swirl green glitter picks from House
- 6 red and green curly glitter picks (for topper) from House
- 14 white berry stems from At Home
- 93 shatterproof ornaments from At Home:
- 9 extra large (150mm/6in)
- 64 medium (70mm/2.8″)
- 20 large (100mm/3.9″)
- 44 ft cluster garland LED lights/1300 lights by Raz (these are a splurge but my favorite lights!)
- Christmas tree skirt from Target
I went very ribbon-heavy with bows, but if that's not your bag, definitely reduce the ribbon and up the other ingredients!
I'm really happy with how it turned out, and hope that it finds a home with people who will really enjoy it! The auction just opened up as I'm typing this, so if you want to find the listing, it's here.
I did my best to strongly wire in every element as this is designed to be transported fully assembled. Everything should stay in place, and if not, it should be easy to re-fluff ribbons or readjust picks.
