Create Christmas Decorations by the Yard
Know any transplanted New Yorkers who this time of year send family and friends back East greeting cards showing Santa jogging on the beach?
In the cards, they complain that there are no seasons in Southern California, no snow and not even much cold.
They can’t wait to get home to a real Christmas.
But local residents with a creative eye can detect a bit of Christmas outdoors and transform raked leaves, clipped trees and trimmed hedges into garlands, centerpieces and wreaths.
While there are those who jump in with plenty of imagination and a yard full of possibilities, others with the same resources lack the assurance to create.
A little instruction can turn the latter into the former.
“Even floral designers had to start somewhere,” said Celia Gallardo, manager of Cummings European Fresh Flower Market in Costa Mesa.
“Someone had to show us. Anyone can do this, but you’d be surprised at the number of people who lack the confidence to try it. They end up paying a professional to make it for them. It’s really a lot easier than they think.”
Armed with a glue gun, floral tape, floral wire and floral foam, just about anyone can turn odds and ends from house and garden into Christmas creations.
Among the easiest decorations to make is the garland, which can be draped over a door frame, sprayed across a fireplace mantle or coiled around a banister. Aside from its aesthetic value, the beauty of a garland is that it can be constructed quickly and easily from Christmas-tree cuttings.
As Gallardo observed: “Christmas trees are rarely perfect. They’re usually too bushy at the bottom or on one side or the other. By trimming the stray branches, not only is the tree neater, but you have the materials to make other decorations.
“Or if you don’t have enough greens, just go to any Christmas tree lot and ask for their discards; they’re usually available for next to nothing.”
Transforming tree cuttings into a garland for the fireplace is as simple as:
* Placing few of those clipped branches across the mantle with the cut ends back to back, tucking one under the other.
* Dotting the greens with pine cones and leftover ornaments.
* Securing these with floral wire, adding bright red candles.
To make a garland for a banister: Overlap branches across the railing and, using floral wire, fasten to the railing in spiral motions down its length.
Finish by attaching an assortment of tree ornaments, candy canes, bows and bells.
One of Gallardo’s favorites is a garland for the front door:
“All I do is take three or four of the longer branches, gather them at the top by the cut ends, wind some floral wire around the ends to keep them together and attach a big red bow to hide the ends. Then I glue on some pine cones and bells, throw on a couple of candy canes, and I have a beautiful decoration for my door that took me no time to make.
“Christmas is the best time of the year,” she added. “It’s really about families doing things together, and making decorations is something that accomplishes that.
“If some of the resources are not readily available in the yard, make an outing of packing everyone in the family car, taking off for Big Bear or even a local park, giving the kids a large trash bag and sending them on a scavenger hunt for acorns, pine cones, seed pods or interesting looking twigs and leaves.”
Such found materials allow for more intricate designs, though they are hardly more complicated.
Most of the fancy table arrangements are merely dried flowers, leaves and twigs that have been spray painted gold or silver for the holidays.
Inexpensive baskets or vases can serve as the base of a centerpiece using these materials.
One of the first steps is to dry the mulch, which requires no more effort than tying string around the stems of flowers, twigs or leaves and hanging them upside down on a nail in the garage.
In two to four weeks, they should have dried sufficiently to be painted.
Once the paint has dried, the creative juices can flow.
To make a centerpiece, place floral foam in the bottom of a basket or vase and punch the dried stems into the foam. For color, add fresh carnations, bottlebrush branches or whatever else is in the garden.
Then insert a few pine cones, a small clipping from the Christmas tree, the front hedge or the eucalyptus tree, and add candy canes, ornaments or even some children’s building blocks arranged to spell noel.
For a hearth decoration, simply fill a fireside basket with pine cones and several brightly colored ornaments.
The possibilities are nearly endless once the basics are established. Arrangements of pine cones, spray-painted hedge clippings, fresh flowers, holly and dried leaves are simple, quick and inexpensive ways to transform a snowless Christmas into a traditional one.
