Deck the halls with boughs of holly—or don’t. Decorating for the holidays the traditional way, with lights, wreaths, and a tree full of ornaments, isn’t for everyone.
If you want to bring the seasonal spirit into your home without dragging boxes of holiday knick-knacks out of storage, you’re in luck. There are plenty of ways to get your home feeling festive, and not a single bough of holly is necessary.
To learn how to execute a holiday-inspired home design—one without Santas or stockings—we tapped designer Gideon Mendelson for his expert advice.
Here’s betting your guests will be utterly impressed with your refined interiors. Read on for Mendelson’s top five tips for decorating your home seasonally without kitschy holiday decor.
Gideon Mendelson is the founder and creative director of the New York-based interior design firm Mendelson Group, and he is no stranger to creating sophisticated interiors.
Design by Mendelson Group / Photo by Eric Piasecki Photography
You don’t have to wrap twinkling lights around a seven-foot-tall Christmas tree to embrace the ambient light of the season.
First things first: nix all harsh white lights. Instead, to transform your home into a winter-friendly respite, opt for warm-toned bulbs for a softer aesthetic.
“Too often, the bright, white lights can give off a cold hospital glow on your walls,” Mendelson says.
With a house full of warm light bulbs—no overhead office lighting here—keep your overhead lights off, and incorporate more lamps and wall sconces in your space. That'll invoke the same intimate feeling of holiday lights.
Design by Mendelson Group / Photo by Eric Piasecki Photography
Walking in a winter wonderland, snow falling and hot cocoa in hand, is charming. Warming
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Most gardeners would agree that the best pastime for cold winter days is looking through seed and plant catalogs imagining the growing season to come. With that in mind, consider these four strong summer blooming perennials for the midwest when you are ordering plants in the coming weeks.
Some people are particular about the garden tools they use. Others take it less seriously and are content with the cheapest things they can find. I’m somewhere in the middle. I’m not one to waste money on overpriced brands, but I do want durable tools that last a good while. Just as important, they need to do the job and be up for the conditions under which I’ll be using them.
A Better Homes & Gardens Christmas craft is going viral on TikTok, but there’s something special about this viral DIY—the original how-to was written in 1969.
DIY Holiday Decor from the Garden If you're looking for a budget-friendly way to add decor for the holidays, start by looking in your own garden for seasonal accents! Create your own holiday decor with elements from the garden
Seed saving is the art of collecting the seed from your crop and using it in subsequent seasons to grow new plants. Even if you save only small quantities of a few crops, understanding more about the life cycle, breeding tendencies, and botany of your crops will help you manage and care for them more effectively.
The colours of autumn are so evocative. Russet, ochre and translucent crimson can look magnificent against a clear blue sky – or more importantly they can light up a dull grey day, catching the eye and cheering the heart. It is fascinating to know a little about the science behind the colour change in the second half of the year, as explained by Chris Clennett at Kew: ‘Trees, like most plants, use chlorophyll to photosynthesise…In autumn, trees that lose their leaves for winter go through a process to shut down photosynthesis and reclaim as many valuable chemicals as possible. Chlorophyll is constantly breaking down and being replaced through the summer, but the process slows down in autumn. This reveals all those other chemicals that were hidden by the presence of the dominant green chlorophyll…yellow flavonols, orange carotenoids and red to purple anthocyanins.’
Luiz Jiménez, 39, has been working on American dairy farms for 20 years. He is used to working long hours for little pay, fearful of losing a vital source of income for his family. A father of three, Jiménez is originally from Oaxaca, Mexico and came to the United States undocumented. He is one of an estimated 238,000 undocumented agricultural workers in the US. Like many others, he is without a visa, credit or health insurance, making it difficult to safely advocate for better working conditions without putting his livelihood at risk.
Few plants generate more revulsion in the garden than junipers. The mere suggestion of planting one often musters a similar reaction to that of saying a dirty word. Maybe we’ve grown weary of their use as evergreen blobs in foundation plantings. Perhaps the thought of meticulously shearing them into the perfect shape sounds daunting (see pruning tips). It could be an early memory of an itchy rash from an up-close encounter with a juniper’s prickly branches. Or it could be boredom with the sea of creeping blue rug junipers (Juniperus horizontalis ‘Wiltonii’, Zones 3–9) planted in every big-box-store parking lot. Although junipers are a midcentury-modern garden staple, generations of gardeners have since decided they have had enough of these controversial conifers. While it’s easy to dismiss them for their deeply ingrained negative traits, junipers have many merits that make them worth reconsideration.
The biggest epiphany of my horticultural career was learning about plant survival strategies. Like most gardeners, I was accustomed to classifying plants as annuals, biennials, or perennials. But dividing them into groups based on their survival strategies instead got me thinking about how they evolved to grow, which in turn helped me to cultivate them more successfully in my garden in Texas.