Long gone are the days when a wreath on the front door, a tree in the bay window and a lineup of stockings on the mantel meant the house was decorated for Christmas.
Today every nook and cranny, from the kitchen to the powder room, get a touch of Christmas cheer.
To dress their homes for the season, some people hire professional floral designers who make holiday house calls. Armed with pruning shears, elaborate French bows and garlands of greens, these behind-the-scenes Santa`s elves have decked a number of Du Page halls.
But forget the boughs of holly. This year it`s more likely wild honeysuckle vines, silk poinsettias and dried hydrangeas festooning the mantel, according to a sampling of Du Page florists.
Colors, too, have an updated look for the holidays. In many homes, the traditional red and green have been relegated to the family room while the mantel and a second tree in the living room are decorated in the room`s decorator colors.
Rich jewel tones such as Christmas wine, hunter green, purple, lemon yellows, cerise (cherry red) and celadon (a pale grayish green) are a few of today`s favorite seasonal hues.
When Judy Malmberg and her partner Shirley Cramer of Persnickety of Naperville were asked to design and install holiday decorations for Bob and Jo Sutherlin`s new home in Naperville`s Cress Creek neighborhood, they took their color cue from the living room.
The Sutherlins are empty nesters, and both had been married before.
”We each had our own Christmas things, but we needed to build our own traditions,” said Jo Sutherlin, explaining why she`d called in a professional to help her create the holiday spirit at home.
She also found the decor in her new house daunting when it came time to decorate for Christmas.
A palette of soft pastels (alabaster, seafoam, teal) in the formal living and dining room did not lend themselves to reds and greens. Malmberg and Cramer came up with the cure.
Creating silk poinsettias in peach and spraying honeysuckle vines with gold, they introduced a complementary Christmas scheme with an everlasting arrangement in the foyer, carrying it throughout the room. But tradition reigned in the Sutherlin family room, where the Persnickety team draped the floor-to-ceiling brick fireplace with garlands of greens, bright red bows and red poinsettias.
The Sutherlins decorated their own tree.
”I think a tree should be a family thing,” said Malmberg, explaining that many families now put up two trees, reserving the one in the family room ”for all the things the kids have made since kindergarten, the things that make Christmas.”
In the living room is a more formal decorator tree keyed to the room`s color scheme. As part of their package price for decorating a home for Christmas, Malmberg and Cramer return after the holidays to help the homeowner disassemble everything, padding the bows for storage and crating the artificial arrangements, so that a slight freshening is all that will be needed the following year.
Julie Humphreys of Mantels and More Inc. of Glen Ellyn said most of her clients prefer taking apart the elaborate mantel and table arrangements she creates for them.
She then reworks and freshens the arrangement to create a new configuration for the coming season. To make sure her arrangements last at least as long as the holiday entertaining, Humphreys unabashedly mixes real with artificial boughs, flowers and fruits so that everyone is fooled.
But she likes to save a prime spot in the arrangement where the hostess can tuck in a vase of freshly cut flowers just before the guests arrive on Christmas Eve.
And she likes to slide in a piece of soft cedar ”to create the wonderful smell of Christmas.”
”Most people have given up on using a lot of fresh greens in their house,” said Humphreys, ”but they want the natural look.”
For the mantel pieces in her own Glen Ellyn Victorian home, including fireplaces in the foyer and dining room, she re-created the natural look by combining silk flowers with armloads of tree branches pruned from her own garden, wild honeysuckle vines-”very hot this year”-hydrangeas, both dried and artificial, dried bittersweet and a forest of other materials.
As for holiday flowers, she eschews the traditional red poinsettia in favor of such blooms as rubrum lilies, French tulips, amarylis, paperwhite narcissus and the new salmon-colored poinsettias.
Humphreys even has a tip for getting the narcissus to stand up straight:
”A tablespoon of gin in a cup of water will do it, and the tulips like a tablespoon of sugar in water.”
Instead of red holly berries she likes yellow-berried holly.
Candles, too, can make a difference. To match the scale in her own high-ceiled Victorian home, she used European-style, 26-inch pencil-thin tapers in the dining room.
In the foyer, bold, black cathedral-style tapers-”they burn 186 hours”- were the foil for an asymmetrical arrangement around the mirror that combines burgundy silk magnolias, birch branches sprayed black, blue spruce branches, Scotch broom and overscaled bows in black and gold.
In Hinsdale, where many of the homes are traditional, the natural Williamsburg look is still important at Christmas but, ”we`re updating it with touches of glitter and vibrant colors that work with our clients`
decors,” said Ron Schlamann, owner of the Hinsdale Flower Shop who has been decorating area homes for years at the holiday season.
”Since we know so many of the homes, their proportions, decors and color schemes, we sometimes create arrangements right in the shop,” he said, explaining that customers may bring in an heirloom container for flowers.
”Just today a woman brought in a silver Russian bread warmer that she wants filled with four dozen roses,” said Schlamann, whose staff creates liners to fit inside heirloom containers so as not to damage their interiors. Other people may come in to buy designer-made bows to dress up their own decorations, but Schlamann and his manager, Steve Pederson, also decorate homes on site as a service to their customers.
Among the homes they decorated this year was the Hinsdale residence of Janie and Bob Petkus, where the mantel in the living room was draped with a Williamsburg-style swag that took its colors from the English floral painting that hangs above the fireplace.
Fruits, dried coxcomb, pepper berries, prairie grasses, bright blue salvia, pine cones and even miniature cerise-colored pineapples combined to create a richly textured look that was continued in other arrangements throughout the living room, dining room and foyer.
”When I first got into this business 40 years ago, I made all my own wreaths and roping by hand,” said Schlamann. ”Now I buy them by the trailer load.”
But he and his staff still create handmade boxwood or mixed green ropings for selected customers. ”They`re all custom-made, not something you can just walk into a store and buy,” he said.
Along with the evergreens, Schlamann said he frequently accents a Christmas arrangement ”with a very important flower that becomes the focal point. And when the flowers are gone, you still have a design.”
Dutch flowers (gerbera daisies and white lilacs) are popular this Christmas season as well as Casablanca lilies and big South American roses in brilliant hot pinks and beautiful champagnes, he said.
Don Robbins of Robbins Flowers in St. Charles created a Santa Fe-style Christmas for a Wayne family whose home reflects the wide-open, adobe look of the desert.
Even the materials he used in the mantel piece and the ornaments on the family Christmas tree had a southwestern flavor: large terra cotta angels, a terra cotta creche, lotus pods, cacti, cow bells and peppers.
The salmon-colored poinsettias were true to the southwestern decor
”because that`s where poinsettias come from,” said Robbins.
On the tree, crushed paper ribbons replaced the old-fashioned popcorn strands and an adobe Santa Claus adorns its branches.
Richard Adam Para of Richard Adam Florist in Wheaton decorates Vincent and Helen Bolger`s Wheaton home every year for the holiday party the couple hosts the first weekend in December for 200 guests.
Theirs is a large sprawling ranch-style home with its own working stables and expansive grounds.
But, said Helen Bolger, ”I`ve always been something of a minimalist.”
To accommodate so many guests plus the Bolgers` six children and their families during the holiday season, she likes to keep the decorations spare.
”So many people have so many holiday decorations up, you see nothing,”
she said. A simple swag on the mantel piece, silk topiary trees in the hall and a Christmas tree decorated in the French fashion, with garlands of beads, golden nosegays and velvet ribbons, set the elegant tone she prefers.
When Christmas is over the decorations go to the basement and her children are invited to help themselves.
”That way I always feel at home in their houses,” she said.
As to what Christmas Day is like at the florists` homes who have spent a frantic season creating other people`s wonderful times, Julie Humphreys summed it up: ”All I want this year is a nap on Christmas Day.”
