Every holiday season, I turn into a decorating machine. The holidays give me the excuse I need to pick some new colors and cut loose! Do you love decorating for holidays, but loathe the thought of spending a lot of time and even more money to make your house feel festive? Me too! Even if your decor hasn’t seen a single change since the early 80’s, you can revamp and revitalize it at the holidays with just a few simple changes. In contrast to formal decorating, where you agonize over paint, fabric, and furniture, holiday decorating is easy. The holidays provide a theme, merchandise, and motifs that are usually mass-manufactured, so you can purchase and decorate at your leisure and in your budget. I guess you could call this the “No Muss, No Fuss, Easy Decorating for the Holidays Guide”! By utilizing these suggestions, you’ll be sipping a hot toddy while everyone else is still decorating.

All of these ideas are very easy and none takes more than a minimum of time and effort. Here are the basic principles: Get an early start. Keep it simple. Have Fun.

1. Get an early start. I can’t emphasize this enough. Avoid the rush. Avoid the crowds. Imagine how nice it would be to have all your little holiday ducks in a row and ready to go so that you can actually take the time and enjoy the holiday season. Lucky for you, there are holiday items in the store already. Scary, but true. Take advantage of it and get the stuff before everyone else does.

2. Keep it simple. Avoid clutter. Less is more, and bold is good. Keep things simple and avoid a cluttered scene. If you have clutter, get rid of it! Pick a color palette and repeat it throughout your home. Last year, I chose silver, turquoise, and orange. It looked completely fabulous. I had simple silver stars, turquoise and orange ball ornaments in glass vessels, white poinsettias, and white amaryllises. I made small silver bows out of wired ribbon and put them around candles and the plants. The Dollar Store is your friend. So is Target. Both are choc full of ridiculously inexpensive décor items, that, if chosen carefully, can make a big impact on your space.

If you are going to use something that has a pattern, keep the pattern large in scale for a bolder impact. You will also see that you need less stuff if you use a bold scale. If you choose to have a tree, use the same color palette. It does not even need to match your existing décor. Have fun with the color and see what happens.

Don’t forget the fireplace and mantel. The fireplace is the living room’s automatic focal point, so be sure and play it up. Style it with a simple arrangement of grapevine, lights, candles, pinecones, etc. Anything really, whatever you can find. If you use some organic material in your arrangement (pine boughs, sticks, etc.) as well as other pieces in your chosen color palette, your spaces will feel unified without feeling matchy-matchy. We hate matchy-matchy.

One of my favorite holiday décor items is a glass bowl or apothecary jar. Fill it with colorful glass ornaments, pine cones, twinkle lights, plants, or whatever. You can place these vessels all over the house and they will fit right in! They also work great as a centerpiece for the dining table. In our shop, we pot up forced paperwhites, hyacinth, and amaryllis bulbs, usually white so they fit into any interior, and we plant them in tall apothecary jars or glass bowls which provide structure for the plant and act as a decorative vessel. Apothecary jars are all over the stores right now and make excellent decoration containers. Fill with peppermint striped candies, fake snow, lemons, mandarins, ball ornaments, you get the idea. A grouping of three would be beautiful, simple, bold, and easy!

3. Have fun! Above all, the whole holiday decorating process should be fun. Think outside your normal decorating scheme and throw some fun into the mix. You can always get away with stuff at the holidays that you never could otherwise. Invite a few friends over to help and have a deco-cocktail party! After your decorating frenzy, cap off the evening with a nice dinner, a few of your favorite television holiday specials (mine is Rudolph) and, of course, a martini.

And remember, as my assistant says, “It is never done until it is overdone.” Cheers and Happy Holidays!