Homes for the Holidays by Lita Lane
Published December 04, 2012
“Homes for the Holidays” is a tradition gaining momentum now for eight years. It’s a seasonal self guided tour of five beautifully designed West Side homes, seasonally decorated by local home décor retailers such as Pottery Barn Kids, Take Me Home Décor and Mint, specifically for the Christmas holidays. It is inspiring and gets the creative juices flowing.
This year it was held on November 24th and 25th. All proceeds of this event go to support the Kids Help Phone Canada. I was thrilled to be asked to help with the decorating of one of these fabulous homes. Alison McDonald of Take Me Home arrived early with boxes and boxes of festive decorations and a crew of four, not wasting any time we went straight to work … at the end of six hours we had decorated two full size trees, a great room, kitchen, dining nook, formal dining room, entrance and powder room. The mantel in the great room was magical with white garlands and branches woven with small lights, adding reflective glittery balls, a large white framed mirror, silver vase and crystal snowflakes. At one point improvising was required when we found we didn’t have a tree skirt so we place two strands of mini lights around the base of the white tree in the great room and laid a plain white tablecloth over the lights, giving the illusion of a glistening snow pile – very affective! So many small touches, like placing cheerful Christmas baubles in apothecary jars, hanging a shimmery reindeer instead of wreath on a window, placing a glitzy tree ornament on each place setting, hanging a wreath from the chandelier and adding icy crystals. All touches big or small added to the end result which was nothing short of fabulous.
