Indoor Decorating

Indoor decorating

Indoor displays
Well it’s time to really get serious about your displays, both inside and out. Now, why in the world should we think about the inside, especially with all the time and work associated with doing the BIG display outside? There are many reasons to also consider doing an indoor display. First and foremost, who can walk into a home that is all decked out for the holidays and not smile? Indoor decorations add so much to the holidays, i.e. villages, Santa collections, etc. They become family traditions with pieces passed down from generation to generation. The little ones get so…
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What’s Christmas Expo?
We get this question, a lot. To most people Christmas is that time of year when there seem to be plenty of days off from work between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Christmas trees start popping up like weeds. Then there’s the challenge about getting into something called the Christmas spirit. It’s hard to define this time of year but it’s hard not to notice most people do seem a little nicer. Then there’s the hassle factor. All the amateur shoppers hit the stores in search of presents causing traffic headaches and long lines at the checkout. Relatives come to visit…
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The world tour
It may well be the most unique concert tour ever undertaken by an individual performer. “The House on Christmas Street International Tour 2010” is entirely supported by fans of one song. Singer, songwriter and 2010 Grammy nominee Judy Pancoast wrote “The House on Christmas Street” in 1998 as a tribute to those mega-decorated houses she’s loved all her life; the ones that can almost be seen from outer space and make the passerby wonder how the homeowner is managing to pay the electric bill. “There seems to be one of those houses in every town,” says Pancoast, “but to my…
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Santaland
Santaland opened for the first time 25 years ago in Madison, MN, a small rural town in west central Minnesota. Inclement weather moved the original Santaland from the frigid cold to the cozy 7,000 square foot second floor in the Heather Nursery & Floral building located on Main Street. Hundreds of volunteer hours and more than $15,000 of in-kind donations have allowed a dedicated group of local and metro elves to create an indoor holiday display that rivals the real North Pole. Santa was speechless when he first saw his new throne. Surrounded by hundreds of packages and more than…
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More views from the UK
One of my other hobbies is oil painting. I create landscapes and abstracts in oils purely for my own pleasure. I was talking with a friend at an art exhibition just last month and she said half jokingly that I should put my art in for the Turner prize (a prestigious art prize in the UK that can catapult the winner into art superstardom.) I said don’t be silly, my paintings are nowhere near good enough. No she replied, not your paintings… your Christmas lights. That got me thinking. We spend lots of time and effort on our displays. But…
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Christmas stockings
The perfect place to set the record straight about Christmas stockings is PlanetChristmas magazine. They’re so much more than decorative pieces in the home that people take for granted. Knowing where the Christmas stockings tradition comes from, what they should look like, where they need to be hung and what should be in them will make you quite the expert in Christmas trivia at the next holiday party. Here’s some Christmas stocking history. There are many different theories about the history of Christmas. Most agree that the story of Saint Nicolas not only attributed to the name Santa Claus but…
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Already planning for this season
Are you ready for the 2010 holiday season? I know I’m excited and it’s only a month until I start decorating the inside of our home. Besides, here in Texas it has been too darn hot to work outside. We’ve been at 99 or higher since May and humidity-temps have been well over 105 for weeks. I have been reworking many of my frames but in the comfort of the cool air conditioning. As usual, I have been on the hunt for additions to the display this year and have been pretty successful. I found several new animated figures from…
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Starting a Christmas business
In the last three editions of PlanetChristmas magazine, I’ve written about sequencing a display for others, planning your own large scale display and a behind the scenes look at two large commercial displays. This month I’d like to take the column in a slightly different direction by sharing with you why I started a Christmas lighting business and how I balance a start-up opportunity with a full time job. Ask twenty owners of small businesses why they started and you are likely to get twenty different answers. Most will say they wanted to control their own fate or they had…
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Another open house success
Our first open house was on December 5, 2009. We normally open the doors at 6:30 in the evening. My youngest grandson and I were taking care of some finishing touches on the garage diorama and he wanted something from out front so I did a quick jaunt through the house, out the front door and bumped right into a gentleman standing on the front step. When I looked past him there was a line of people all the way down to the corner, a block and a half away. After recovering from shock since I didn’t expect anyone to…
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Christmas decorating trends
I honestly thought when volunteering for this assignment that finding out what the big Christmas trends for 2010 were going to be would be easy since it was already March and the season was just eight months away. Surely all the merchants had placed their big orders with the manufacturers and knew what they would be pushing hard for the holidays. Boy, was I wrong. If I was a newbie I’d be concerned but experience has taught me no one really wants to say much, at least on the record, because no one has confidence what the real trends are…
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