Holiday Decorating Tips: Christmas Candles

By Jeanette Joy Fisher

How to Light Up Your Home for Joy

Do you love the winter holiday season or does this time of year cause you stress? One way to lower your holiday stress, using fewer decorations, decreases your "just have to much to do" list.

However, you still want to display Christmas candles because these decorations bring smiles to you and your loved ones. As days grow shorter and cooler and the suns sets earlier, people naturally crave the warmth and comfort of light, especially natural sources such as a bonfire or the flame of a Christmas candle.

Christmas Candle Tips

Luminaries

Save your energy and your money. You don't need to line your entire sidewalk with luminaries. Get a similar effect with four large candles in clear glass containers near your front door. These glowing candles will welcome your guests without all the work of gathering bags, buying votive candles that just burn up fast, and shoveling all that sand.

Window Candles

Many cultural holiday traditions include placing a lighted candle in front windows to be seen from the outside. Pamper yourself. Place a candle in any dark window at night. Rather than peering into a dark void, you'll focus on the cheerful flame and feel comforted and uplifted.

Gift Yourself

Create a nightly quiet ritual for yourself in a quiet place away from distractions and the hustle of the holidays. Place candles around your bathtub and unwind, or by your favorite reading chair and instead of reading sit in the quiet and reflect upon the brightness of a single candlelight. Listen to quiet music or simply enjoy the peace and stillness. Ponder the joys in your life and express gratitude. This quiet time may be your most treasured gift to yourself.

Candlelight Carol-Sing

Recycle last year's greeting cards by cutting each into a disk or rounding the edges, punch a hole in the center, and slide a taper candle half-way through the hole. Gather your friends and family around the piano or hearth and sing familiar Christmas carols as each person holds their own candlelight. Pause to reflect upon the fact that each individual brings their own special light to the world and recognize the common spiritual light in each of us.

Candle Night-Night

When it's time to settle the children down to bed on Christmas Eve, calm them with a soothing candlelight ritual. My daughter’s children walk to bed, each carefully carrying a lighted candle through a dark hallway, singing "Silent Night."

Happy Holidays!

© Jeanette Fisher

How to Decorate with Halloween Party Decorations

Author: Thomas Sondheim

Your Halloween party decorations will probably include the standard range of items, but there are some simple little extra tricks you can easily add that will add a scary surprise, and give your guests a chilling fright and cause a few screams.

You will no doubt be planning plenty of carved pumpkin jack-o-lanterns lit with candles placed around your party room, their ghoulish faces gleaming in the subdued lighting. Luminous images of ghosts and ghouls of all description can be bought and hung to glow in the low lighting around the walls of the room. Gossamer cloth or commercial imitation spider web quickly creates a haunted house atmosphere.

Suspending decoration items like bats, flying witches on broom sticks, large hairy spiders, balloons with ghostly faces, skeletons and the like from the ceiling, down to to face level, will have your guests dodging around among these horrors in the flickering candle light, and always on the lookout for their next fright. Distributing plastic spiders and other shocking surprises around where people sit, or on tables among the drinks and plates, will help to keep your guests on edge.

If you hang a number of thin threads from the ceiling in different parts of the room they will not be noticed in the subdued lighting, but will be felt unexpectedly as your guests move around. This can be a surprising sensation, and suggests a ghostly presence that will often get a shrieking reaction from your guests.

Frights come when unexpected things suddenly happen. You could set up a few lights on timers to occasionally briefly illuminate scary scenes or pictures in two or three otherwise dark corners of the room. The effect is increased if you are able to coordinate sound effects to draw attention when the light comes on. Depending on the age group of your guests, you could create a frightening three dimensional scene that is briefly revealed, such as a ghostly headless or hanging man.

Fog machines are readily available from party hire specialists. Used with lighting effects, they will immediately create a chilling and eerie atmosphere in the room as the fog floats across the floor of the room around the feet of your guests. If you can, set up an artificial tombstone or two to conceal the exact location of the machine.

With large screen televisions becoming more common, you could play a horror movie in the background, with the sound turned down, to help to set the scene.

Music plays a large part in creating the atmosphere. At least for the early part of the party, Halloween sound effects and music like the classic Monster Mash will heighten the sense of tension in the room. With the party in full swing later on, your guests will expect to hear their favorite dance music tracks. A compilation interspersing Halloween sound effects would help to maintain the atmosphere.