Home For the Holidays: Decorating with Cindy Skaggs

Baking, decorating, family…all the things that fill the holidays with joy. Join our Entangled authors as they share a little something special from their home during the holidays.

O Christmas Trees

Buckets, bins, and tubs filled with decorations, lights, and trees clog the garage storage eleven months of the year so that for one month, our home is a Christmas Spectacular. It started when we renovated an old Victorian house. The living room had beautiful wood molding, bay windows, and a pocket door, but didn’t look quite right with a modern day tree. So, I bought a humungous tree for the living room that filled the bay windows and covered it in period ornaments.

But, you know, we still had the original Christmas tree, and it seemed a shame to let it get dusty in the garage. So we put that one in the adjacent dining room, which was a huge room that could surely accommodate a tree plus the dining table. We decorated that tree with the dated ornaments we bought for the kids each year. Sentimental, this tree represented who we were, and not the house.

And that year, I hit the day after Christmas sales and bought… Christmas trees. 75% off, so it was almost like they were paying me to take them away. By the time my oldest was five, we had a tree for every room in the house. A tabletop tree in the kitchen, little potted trees for the guest rooms, a tree that turned circles, a tree that had fiber optic lights. Even the kids had trees in their rooms.

For me, it made no sense to segregate Christmas to the public rooms. Obviously, the joy of Christmas should spread throughout the house. Wreathes covered bathroom mirrors, the front door, and the side door. For a few years when the kids were little, I may have gone a bit insane.

Now that the kids are older, I’ve tried to simplify my Christmas décor, but every room still has a tree. We have a decorative one in the living room window—blue and silver this year—plus the tall family tree in the (much smaller) dining room, and the kids have mini-trees in glossy foil to suit their personalities. I even let them “wrap” their bedroom doors in Christmas paper.

My fanatical love of Christmas is why I wrote the not-quite-perfect Christmas story for Sofia and Logan. Don’t get me wrong, Logan’s trying to create good memories to drown out the bad of Sofia’s former life, but that’s not what makes this a Christmas to remember!