I can speak directly to Holiday decor, specifically Christmas holiday season decor. I am pretty much opposite of you these days, but there was a time when Christmas crap was one of my gazingus pins.


We lived in a picturesque Victorian neighborhood that decorated itself to the nines for Christmas season with holiday parties and neighborhood events and a tour of houses that netted $50,000 and etc. This neighborhood is five blocks from the florist wholesale district which drew me like a cat to catnip. I ended up with several Christmas trees of various sizes, lots of “wholesale “priced Christmas crap, all stored in our very large horizontal closet underneath our third floor eaves. I had to crawl into it, but it was a closet of size. When we moved to Hermann I got rid of all that stuff and swore I would get my Christmas decor down to one or two tubs that held only the things I really valued. I did that when we moved. But since then I’ve been accumulating more yet I’m trying to keep it down.

mainly I dread the storing of this stuff. It just depresses me to think I’m gonna end up with tubs and tubs full of junk again. That’s why I’m trying to go with natural products whenever possible. I still remember something DH said to me decades ago that really stuck in my brain and it is this: we went to the big box store called (I think) Garden Ridge. DH looked around after we had shopped for several minutes and said “there’s nothing from gardens here, it’s all made in China!” And that really struck me because it dawned on me that everything in the store was cheap crap that came from a container shipped from China. There was nothing natural about it. There was nothing nice about it.

So since then I’ve been trying to develop my taste so that natural plant material is mich of our decor but of course that’s limiting.

Here are my challenges:

We are on our town’s Holididay house tour this year. Last year I gave in and purchased a fake tree because the natural trees get dry so fast. It’s scary how quickly they dry up. But I’m shooting for natural garlands and berries for the most part this year although the berries dry and fall off, and I think my dog has been eating them, so they’re probably poisonous for him. He’s such an idiot.

So I need to decorate to make ticket holders to the house tour happy, but it’ will not be excessive. I want holiday decor in every room they see but the house tour is only one afternoon so I’m not going to spend $1000 on it. In my former Victorian neighborhood our holiday house tour was a bigger 1000 people through the houses so then I would’ve gone all out.

besides natural decor, I have the most wonderful Goodwill store nearby anyone has ever seen. They hold all of their holiday decor and put it out after Halloween. I can buy a some stuff there, it’ll be on the house tour on December 6, and then I can take it down and drop it off at Goodwill in those first two weeks of December 2025 when people are still buying that stuff. For me that is a win/win.

A final challenge is that my town has a fundraiser called “holiday tablescapes “and I participate every year. We have to put up a different tablescape each year, we can’t use ones we have used in the past. I have finally developed the formula where I have basic red, green, and white dinnerware that I store for this. Then each year I use different accoutrements to carry out a theme.

All of the dinnerware came from my Goodwill store. I’m telling ya, It is a gold mine!