His Elves Are Like No Others

Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion in Holmby Hills is decorated inside and out for the holidays, with mistletoe hung throughout the 14th century Gothic-style house.

“Hefner likes these kinds of holidays with friends and family,” said Dick Rosenzweig, executive vice president of Playboy Enterprises. “He always has a dinner and a movie on Christmas Day for his friends, but he also plans to spend part of the holiday with his family.”

Hefner is separated from his wife, ex-Playmate Kimberly Conrad Hefner, but he often sees her and their two children because they live next door to the Playboy Mansion. “He usually goes there and visits regularly,” Rosenzweig said.

The bushes outside the Playboy Mansion’s front gate are decorated in blue lights, with multicolored lights on the bushes outside the back gate. The rest of the shrubbery and trees on the nearly six-acre estate are covered with white twinkling lights, and a large red bow greets visitors at the front gate.

From the gate to the main house, lighted 6-foot candy cane decorations line both sides of the drive, with twinkling white lights and garlands strung between them.

Wreaths decorate the front doors to the main, guest and game houses as well as doors to the seven bedrooms, including the master suite.

Hefner’s bedroom also has garlands over the fireplace and miniature stockings, filled with candy and tiny toys, hanging from the mantel.

A Christmas tree sits in an alcove of the living room, the 12-foot tree’s top crowned by a star, its boughs laden with tinsel, ornaments and lights. Circling the tree: a Big Hauler Thunderball Express.

Even as they were in the Middle East last week, Hillary and Bill Clinton were planning to spend a couple of days after they return decorating the Christmas tree in the first family’s quarters of the White House.

It takes them that long because they like to reminisce over every ornament, which they have collected since they were married in 1975, said Julie Mason, the first lady’s deputy press secretary. “They decorate the tree all themselves,” she added, “and because they have been collecting ornaments for so long, the tree really gets weighted down.”

The Clintons’ tree is a 14-foot Fraser fir. The tree was donated by the same Wisconsin tree farm that gave the White House its official Christmas tree, an 18 1/2-foot balsam fir that sits in the Blue Room. There are 18 Christmas trees in the White House and 10 on the grounds.

Decorations in the first family’s quarters were described as traditional, with many garlands and poinsettias. The rest of the White House is decorated in the white, silver and gold “Winter Wonderland” theme chosen by Hillary Clinton in June.

Among the official decorations is a gingerbread house in the State Dining Room. The edible castle, with towers and bridges, has miniature versions of Socks and Buddy, the Clintons’ pets.

And in recognition of Hanukkah, the White House has a handmade brass menorah on display in the West Wing lobby. The menorah is on loan from the Gomez Mill House in Marlboro, N.Y., the earliest surviving Jewish homestead in North America.

Phyllis Diller spent one afternoon last week filling Christmas stockings for her grandchildren, who are going to the comedian’s Brentwood house today with the rest of her family to help her decorate her 6-foot tree.

“I’m going to have a ham and a family afternoon of decorating,” she said. “One of my mother’s favorite sayings was, ‘Many hands make work light.’ ” Diller has five children, four grandsons and “lots of extended family,” she said.

Dom DeLuise likes arts and crafts, and it’s his job at Christmastime to create the nativity scene at his Pacific Palisades house. “I make a little cave with a chamois or a paper bag, and then we get trimmings from the garden, so we have rocks and small trees in the scene,” he said.

He also likes to string popcorn “and take colored paper and make loops, to string around the tree.” He makes some ornaments from pine cones. “And I love tinsel and old items no longer useful,” he said. “If you do something interesting with them, they can become ornaments.”

The comic and actor, also an author of cookbooks and children’s books, likes most of all to cook. “I’m Italian,” he said, “so I like to fix shrimp or calamari on Christmas Eve. We have a quiet dinner and exchange presents in the morning.”

DeLuise’s wife, actress Carol Arthur, started a tradition 20 years ago of giving an annual charitable donation in the names of folks to whom she and her family send holiday cards. With their cards, the DeLuises sponsor three Amerasian children through the Pearl S. Buck Foundation.

The couple, who are grandparents, have three grown children: Peter, a director; Michael, an actor who has appeared on “NYPD Blue” and “Brooklyn South,” and David, a regular on the new sitcom “Jesse.”

Zsa Zsa Gabor was planning to decorate her Bel-Air home with poinsettias and a Christmas tree with ornaments of silver, red and gold.

The actress also has a 4- to 5-foot antique wooden horse that she decorates with evergreen garlands and little lights. An avid horsewoman, Gabor owned a 21-acre horse ranch in Ventura County for many years.

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Mark Curry, the 6-foot, 6-inch comedian who starred as a basketball star-turned-teacher in the long-running ABC sitcom “Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper” (now in syndication) and created a four-minute improvisational piece as a cabdriver in the movie “Armageddon,” owns a small house in Studio City in which he has put a Christmas tree in nearly every room.

There are trees in the bedroom, living room, dining room, family area and kitchen. And the house, which the comic and actor has owned for five years, is decorated on the outside with icicle-like lights and Gucci bows.

There is also a city snow scene on the dining-room table, where he and his friends plan to eat Christmas dinner. His friends helped him decorate the house at a party two weeks ago.

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Bing Crosby’s Toluca Lake house, later owned by Andy Griffith and then Jerry Van Dyke, looks a lot like it did at Christmastime when the famous crooner lived there in the 1930s and 1940s, thanks to the holiday decorating of its current owners, entertainment publicist Kerry Fretty-Stickney and her husband, attorney Larry Stickney.

The couple bought the house from Van Dyke a year ago for about $2.3 million, and they just decorated it for their holiday party, which was also a housewarming.

The party invitation was a copy of an old Bing Crosby postcard, with the house pictured as it was when he lived there. Using Crosby’s hit “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” as a decorating theme, the Stickneys also showed Crosby movies and played his recordings at their gathering.

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Howie Mandel celebrated Hanukkah on his daily talk show by having some 5- and 6-year-olds from a Hebrew academy talk to him about the meaning of the Jewish holiday.

As for decorating for the holidays at his L.A.-area home, he said, “We’re just hoping to take down the Halloween things--the cobwebs on the fencing and the jack-o’-lantern on the door.”