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Last year, we put up no Christmas decor, not even a tree. I was just so sick and tired of the crass commercialism that has come to characterize Christmas and the idea of ostentatious display was unbearable. My daughters called me The Grinch but I stood my ground. I have not changed my mind -- the spirit of Christmas does not die if no blinking lights and wreaths and garlands adorn one's home.
When we moved to a new house in July, my then 15-year-old daughter's first and most heartfelt demand was that I stop playing The Grinch and put up Christmas decor this year. I gave in. Not because I have changed my position since but because I have learned one valuable lesson from last year -- putting up Christmas decor is a chance for bonding with the family, especially with the children, and I singlehandedly ruined that chance last year. I won't make the same mistake twice.
But where do I find the middle ground? How can we not fall victim to the mindless spending? How do we stay away from the "friendly" competition among neighbors as to who has the prettiest Christmas decor which almost always turns out into a contest to upstage one another? I made a list of what I hope to accomplish with this Christmas decorating and how I hope to achieve them:
1. Make the decorating a family affair
The idea is to get everyone together and work -- from the conceptualization to the execution of every project for every part of the house. Shopping together won't do it. That's not bonding; that's just an excuse for indiscriminate spending. So, what we did first was to gather ideas. It started with a wreath intended to be placed at a picture window beside the stairs. My daughter, Sam, started to scour the web and found instructions for making wreaths out of twigs and dried leaves. That set us on the right path. We'll decorate, all right but, as much as possible, we will use materials that we can just gather -- from inside the house, from the garden, from the empty lots in the neighborhood...
2. No ready-made store-bought Christmas tree ornaments
In consonance with the idea for the wreath, and because this is supposed to be about doing things together, I bought a book on Holiday paper crafts.
The projects use washi paper but I figure we can substitute ordinary colored paper (even pages from old magazines) and scraps of fabric which we have in abundance in the house. But the best thing about the projects in this book is how it encourages the use of things we would ordinarily throw out. Like these kimono hangings...
... made from empty milk cartons.
And these egg ornaments...
... made from real egg shells.
3. No antics a la Danny De Vito in "Deck the Halls"
In Mandaluyong City in Metro Manila, there is a street where, every Christmas season, residents put up lights and mechanical decorations that would upstage the decor of department stores. The practice has stopped now but people still talk about it. I don't want that for us. I want the kind of Christmas decor that says "the family in this house celebrates Christmas" rather than "the family in this house wants to impress every passerby and make him gape in awe."
It would be a coup of sorts and I'm actually excited. As Christmas draws nearer, I anticipate every single day the laughter and the bantering that will accompany the making of the Christmas decor. It doesn't matter if the results don't look as pretty or as refined as the ones we see in the malls. It doesn't matter if everything looks home-made and without the vavoom effect. What's important is that we will be decorating in the spirit of what Christmas is really all about -- the family.
