I don’t own decorations of any kind for any holiday. I live alone and I don’t really celebrate much of anything. So my questions are:
- Do you decorate your home, office, automobile, etc. at all?
- If so which holidays?
#goals
I decorate for the seasons.
I kick off winter with a fondue party and make my place more “hygge” for the season. Candles, cozy blankets, baking bread, making tea and soup. Decor involves pinecones and coniferous branches, my rustic dark wood table is left uncovered. I have smart bulbs, so usually warm lighting. That sort of thing.
As a contrast, in summer I go more Mediterranean accents. Bowls of fruit, a wreath of wildflowers, I make limoncello and instead of candles, I’ll use an Aera scent machine for smells like “fresh laundry.” I frequently have bouquets of lavender around, and a French country tablecloth on the rustic table.
That’s the general idea anyway. Fall might have gourds, leaves, and cider in the mix.
So, while not really for a particular “holiday,” I do enjoy honoring the seasons by trying to be in sync with them. I live alone, but entertain quite a bit.
For Halloween, yes. We actually have a contest at work, we get it spooky, and at home I decorate the front porch. Love Halloween.
For Christmas I barely decorate at work, at home we get outside lights and inside a tree, not really anything else.
I don’t think it matters (decorating specifically for holidays) but if I lived alone I’d want to decorate for me, so it would probably be sort of Halloween every day. That’s kind of how my work cube is, have a toy rat and crows out all the time but at Christmas I give them little Santa hats.
No, to the point where I’ve had a few friends and family members offer to buy me decorations (or they’ll text me of ones on sale), and I always turn them down.
Halloween, I’ll put out a pumpkin if I’m feeling frisky, but that’s about it. Christmas, I’ve considered getting a tree, and had a roommate that had a really small plastic one with two ornaments that’d we’d put out.
But they’re too expensive, they’re too much work to put up/take down (especially outside in the snow), they take up too much room both while in use and in storage, my dog would probably fuck with them or be afraid of them (Halloween), they drive electricity use and cost up, they can be stolen, they can increase fire risk, I normally live alone so it’d only be for my dog and I, the list goes on.
I tell friends/family, particularly for Christmas since many of them can’t believe I just don’t do decorations, that I draw a Christmas tree on a piece of paper and tape it to my wall every year. Costs $0.05 in ink, paper, and tape, and 5 minutes to put up and take down. Easily movable, lightweight, efficient.
When my kids were younger, before we had money, we had a “tree” each year that I’d put up after they went to bed. Always something different. One year lights in the coat rack, one year construction paper on the wall, one year my ex cut the top off one of the bushes outside and we sort of carved it into the cone shape, once an inflatable beach ball sort of tree, all sorts of different things but it was never an actual Christmas tree.
Same. On top of the fact the commercialization cheapens the experience.
I’m really big on Halloween. I decorate the interior of my classroom and my house (sometimes a little outside of my house like cobwebs over the gate and fencing and a tombstone or three, but we had painters working this year, so that stuff stayed in the garage).
My partner decorates hardcore for Christmas/Yuletide, but it’s all very secular and interior with just a wreath outside on our door, so it’s nice to not have to put up lights lol.
I don’t do any other holidays, tbh. My grandmother gave us so much stuff for Easter and 4th of July, but we don’t celebrate either.
We decorate for seasons, generally, and have like spring/summer/fall/winter decor, but that’s mainly just swapping out pillows on the couch and little flower arrangements or a few knick nacks. Some of the Easter stuff was useful for our spring decorations, and, thankfully, my aunt ended up snagging a bunch of the other Easter stuff because she has fond memories of those decorations when she was a child.
A lot of the other stuff that wasn’t trash worthy (most of the chintzy 4th of July stuff) was scooped up by others in a garage sale, so it was nice to see some other people enjoy those things.
My grandma has always loved setting up garage sales and she was super sweet to everyone who showed interest or bought her old decorations. It was really nice for her to see these keepsakes go to a new home and know that they were valued.
She’s mellowed a lot in the last ten or so years and I was a little surprised with how gung ho she was about throwing the cheaper stuff away lol she was acting like the amazing hostess she has always been and saying things like “This is my last garage sale, so only the nice things make it to the tables for sale!”
I know that’s kind of a tangent, but I really have enjoyed helping her downsize and move into a smaller space near my parents, and thought this story would probably apply to a lot of others’ experiences with family decorations and memories.
Edit: It was also pretty cute how my grandma was giving things away to people who really liked things. She’s always done this, but this time seemed a little more special and personal for her. She had so much stuff that she made a decent amount on the furniture anyway, but that was definitely not the goal for any of us lol.
I don’t decorate, but my husband does (he’s super into it and I am not). He decorates the house for Halloween, thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. One year, my kids made me put a waving jack skellington on my back windshield wiper.
The only holiday I decorate for is Halloween. We put a few things up indoors every year and our front yard decorations are slowly growing with pumpkin and haunted garden themed items. I like to put purple and orange solar lights out too. Otherwise we don’t celebrate any other holidays by decorating. I do leave any general fall stuff out through Thanksgiving, but it’s more just Halloween leftovers.
From Nov 24th, we progressively decorate the house, one item per day, throughout Brumalia - the old Roman/Byzantine winter festival - in preparation for Saturnalia.
Otherwise, we’ll have a pair of candles going for the eight sabbats themselves, regardless of anything else that we do for them, but I don’t think that candles alone really count as decorations.
I have a set of outdoor lights that stay outdoors, that are programmable, so they are always seasonal/holiday/birthday related. Indoors we do Halloween, Christmas, Easter, and I’m sure others
That’s my plan for our new home. I just have to figure out what to buy.
Otherwise, we have a couple of light-up penguins that my kids like having out for Christmas. I could be just fine without any decorations, but it is what it is.
Wled is great for the ones around all the time, xlights/fpp if you want anything orchestrated. (Warning: it, like most hobbies, is a money sink)
I sometimes make decorations for christmas out of sticks, pinecone, and other stuff I find. For Halloween my partner and I will carve a pumpkin. I think for us it has less to do with the holidays and more about bringing the nature of a season inside
I live alone, too but since a few years ago I started decorating for Christmas because I like the vibe of it. I got myself a fake Christmas tree from Ikea last year that looks surprisingly good.
For any other occasion I don’t decorate because I don’t participate in it.
I do decorate (mostly for christmas) and then forget to put all of it away again. I think I finally removed the last christmas snowglobe i still had out in Sep from last year. Still gonna do it again soon cos Christmas is coming up^^
No. I am white knuckling life just trying to make it. I have no time for traditions.
Back when I worked in an office I would put up badass president pics for Fourth of July. Too lazy to find them, but stuff like Kennedy riding a robot unicorn on the moon, FDR in wheelchair themed power armor, Roosevelt gunning down big foot in a forest fire, etc.
At home, the only significant decorating I do is for Christmas. There’s enough misery out there, and I choose to embrace the joy and the appeal to the better side of our nature. So we have lights, fake candles, and so on, and we put up a tree that gets a new ornament or two every year which fills it with memories. And as a finishing touch we hang a banner declaring “All creatures will make merry under pain of death”
i did for halloween and that’s the only holiday i celebrate. i throw in dia de los muertos just to extend it a few more days and i take vacation days off for it as well.
when it’s halloween: i put costumes on my pets; decorate my home with renter friendly decor; and then redecorate again one day 1 of dia de los muertos with a shrine to the people i’ve loved in the past with pictures and keepsakes that were once theirs and then add prayer candles similar to these with lgbt & other notable figures like devine, mlk jr, james baldwin, malcom x, marsha p johnston, matthew shepherd, harvey milk, etc. and i put the star trek delta or idic instead of the crucifix, but i keep the statuette of the lady of guadalupe.
