Christmas Tree Decorating

Featured Pro: Kristan Cunningham
Category: Home Décor
Time: 2:35


KRISTAN CUNNINGHAM: The holidays are here again, and it’s time to make your tree the envy of the neighborhood. I’m Kristan Cunningham with your GMC Trade Secret, courtesy of the GMC Acadia.

So this year, instead of pulling out the same old ornaments that you’ve been looking at for years, think about a theme tree. And it doesn’t have to break the bank. In this case, I went for a kid theme. And the whole look revolves around this gumball garland. And these are real gumballs, threaded with a needle and thread, all of them. And you know this, because the reds have been separated. Kids can eat them all season.

But I use those colors to dictate an overall color scheme, and then looked for toys that I could find in excess for a little amount of money, like army guys. You can get, like, a hundred for a few dollars. But you spray them yellow, aqua and navy, and the colors all start working together. We’ve got dinosaurs. We’ve got little cars, little robots, origami cranes. How cute. And the idea with this is you haven’t invested a ton of money, so you can make it as fun and as specific a color scheme as you want to.

All right, let’s take a look at another one. Okay, this one’s a totally different look. How about a tree that represents the man of the house? If you look at this tree, just about everything came from the hardware store. A couple of things came from the fishing supply store too. We’ve got a lure. But otherwise I need a skeleton key – how pretty is that? – a watch face, a whistle, a lock, even fan poles, because they look like jewelry; ooh, the pulley. And then, draping the whole shebang, a chain, right off the roll, that industrial stuff. But in brass, it actually looks quite glamorous

All right, let’s take a look at one more. And for our third and final tree, we have a vintage-style tree. You know, back before there were $18 glitter ornaments and cartoon characters and all that business, we decorated our trees with what we could find in our yards or on our farm. And in this case, we’ve got some seeded cotton. We’ve got wheat, berries. See those little birds’ nests? How cute is that?

And also there weren’t electric lights. You basically lit candles at midnight on Christmas Eve, and that was all you got. Well, we don’t have a fire hazard. We have electrified candles. But we have the look of the authentic thing – little candle guys to drive home that vintage look.

I’m Kristan Cunningham, and this was your GMC Trade Secret about how to decorate three different Christmas trees.