The Holiday Switcheroo

If you were like millions of other Americans this past weekend, you got busy on Friday tearing down the Thanksgiving décor to make room for the Christmas tree and holiday wreaths. It’s always fun to blast the Christmas music while eating turkey leftovers and decorating the house, but it’s also a lot of work.

Rather than creating the three traditional holiday schemes—Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas—use base elements to anchor the decorations. From there, add and subtract components as the weeks go on. For example, pumpkins (at least those you choose not to carve for jack-o-lanterns) can carry you from Halloween through Thanksgiving, and red berries go from Turkey Day to the end of the year and well into winter if you so choose.

Anchors that can work for Halloween and Thanksgiving: burlap, mums, gourds, acorns, sunflowers.

Anchors that work for Thanksgiving and Christmas: red plaid, cranberries, birch logs, metallic accents, wishbones, pine cones.

Here are a few transitional ideas to get the creative juices flowing:

• For Halloween, hide decorative spiders, spider webs and bats within a pumpkin and gourd arrangement, and simply pick them out when the trick or treating is over.

• Choose a red and gold tablescape for your Thanksgiving table, as opposed to the typical accents of orange and yellow, to make it easily adaptable for the Christmas season.

Photo credit: Magic Holiday Home

• Move branches of fake cranberries from the Thanksgiving table décor to the Christmas tree, and then on to the mantle for easy, holiday-neutral winter trimming.

Photo credit: This Next

• Consider spray painting late season pumpkins white, and then applying glitter or sparkle paint to make them relevant for weeks longer than normal.

Photo credit: Paint and Tofu

Save yourself some decorating time this season, and use it to do more of what you during the holidays, like drinking eggnog and watching “Elf” (our personal favorite).  What are your favorite holiday decorations?