Try Restraint With All That Tinsel

‘Tis the season to be tacky.

No, not you. Tacky is that boorish guy down the street. Your brother’s wife. That blonde Tri-Delt you hated in college.

Sorry, folks, but holidays are the most dangerous decorating times of the year. Too many of us, caught up in the spirit of the season, go overboard. Too much tinsel. Too many cutesy little plastic elves and Santas. Too many bows. It’s almost enough to send the Martha Stewarts of the world into cardiac arrest.

But others (you know who they are) always seem to rise above the holiday mania to produce a decor good enough to kick good old Martha right off her Christmas special. (Ah, if only he or she had a good agent.)

Teressa Thompson is one of those people. She’s the one friends ask to help with decorating or to make a centerpiece. She’s the one the charities ask to design a tree so they can auction it off. And, yes, she’s the one that you would kill to be like.

All this and she swears she never took a course in decorating or floral arranging. Instead she credits her husband of 26 years, Bill, who developed a fine sense of taste buying and selling antique furniture and cars.

“Bill has taught me a lot,” she says. “I honestly don’t pick out anything without getting his opinion. He’s extremely creative.”

Even before a visitor walks into her waterfront home in the Rio Vista neighborhood of Fort Lauderdale, it’s obvious that this is the residence of someone with taste and style. An antique wheelbarrow full of silk poinsettias sits by the entrance. A carefully decorated wreath is near the doorbell, and vertical pieces of greenery decorated with ribbons adorn the front door.

Inside, every one of the public rooms is decorated, but nothing looks like it’s too much. Everything is in perfect balance.

Her secret is simple: “Treat your decorations as you would any accessory.”

That means using restraint and editing yourself to keep from overdoing. It also means not disrupting your whole household for Christmas. Unlike those of us who disassemble our decor for the holidays, Thompson doesn’t move any major piece of furniture. She merely adds accessories. “If you have to move things around,” she says, “after Christmas you can’t wait to put everything back in order.”

Each year the decorating has a slightly new twist because she doesn’t like to do the same thing. She changes the fancy wired ribbon she uses to decorate wreaths and other greenery, alters the color scheme and varies the place and arrangement of her Christmas objects.

Typically, her design inspiration begins with the ribbon. Last year the ribbon of choice was plaid. This year she found five rolls of burgundy velvet ribbon with gold trim and matching burgundy tassels - a good start for a lush, Victoria inspired look.

Her two-week decorating project began in the dining room, where the main decoration is focused on an antique mirror over a carved teak altar table. She bought a swag of greenery and didn’t like the way it looked because it draped only halfway down the sides of the mirror. No problem. She added more greenery by attaching it with floral wire.

Using her characteristic restraint, she added white lights and burgundy ribbon - some in bows, others merely looped and held in place with floral wire. The table features more greenery, the burgundy tassels around the necks of blue-and-white ginger jars, and an old-fashioned Santa wearing a burgundy robe.

Thompson resisted the temptation to put the Christmas tree in the living room because she likes symmetrical balance and wanted to keep the potted bamboo palms on either side of the fireplace.

Again she maintained an elegant look by just adding accessories - a gold reindeer in the middle of the mantel is the focal point. On the wall is a simple wreath, decorated with velvet poinsettias with gold tips and gold backs and a different style ribbon in the same burgundy and gold tones.

“Ribbon is a great way to bring in color,” she says.

Thompson’s quest for the perfect tree sometimes takes hours. She prefers a large tree - about 10 feet tall - in either the blue spruce or Fraser fir variety. And it must have a graceful droop to the branches.

“I have been known to take a tree back because it wasn’t right,” she says. “One year the tree was too small, and another year it was too big. The year it was too big we traded with our neighbors, whose tree was too small.”

This year the tree is decorated with a variety of Victoria-inspired items - small chairs, dolls, bunches of dried hydrangeas, wicker baskets filled with pine cones. The accent? Ribbons, of course.

She prefers positioning the tree in the family room next to a wall decorated with a floor-to-ceiling storefront from Argentina that she and Jim found at an auction. Jim, who does many of the alterations to the house, made the center of the storefront into a fireplace with green marble surround.

Inspired? You should be. The sales for holiday decorations should start soon. Get a good start on next year’s decorating with Thompson’s suggestions: Faux garland is a wonderful decorating tool. It can be used around mirrors, on tops of bookcases, surrounding antique toys.

Look for inexpensive items with potential. Find a miniature chair from a discount store, recover the seat in velvet and hang it on the tree.

You can’t have too many white lights. Use them with garland or on a wreath.

A unifying color is the key to a sophisticated decorating scheme. Although you want to settle on a few basic colors (such as her gold and burgundy), your decorations will look more interesting if you vary the texture and style of the wired ribbons.

Dried flowers, such as baby’s breath, can make attractive ornaments when tied with a ribbon.

Gold spray paint can transform a simple object into an elegant one. For example, spray paint a basket gold and fill it with pine cones.

See any tiny doll’s clothes on sale? If they look vintage, they make a charming decoration when draped over a small hanger.

If you would like a small tree to use as an accent on a table, start with one of those $9.99 faux trees you find at a discount store. Put it in a more attractive container (such as an urn spray painted gold) and fill in all the empty spaces with fake fruit and berries, silk ivy and colorful wired ribbons.