Christmas Decorations
Trees, lights, wreaths and table settings — what to put up, in what order, and when to start so none of it is a rush.
- Areas covered
- 6
- Best start date
- 1st Dec
- Traditional take-down
- 12th
What order should you decorate in?
Decorate in this order: tree lights first, then tree ornaments, then the mantel and stairs, then the front door wreath, and the table last. Lights before ornaments matters — threading a light string through a decorated tree means taking half the ornaments off again. Most people put a tree up on the first weekend of December; a real tree cut earlier than that will be dropping needles by Christmas Day.
- Tree lights
- Roughly 100 bulbs per foot of tree height
- Real tree lifespan
- 4-5 weeks indoors, if watered daily
- Wreath timing
- Fresh evergreen: make it in December, not November
- Take-down
- Twelfth Night — 5 or 6 January, depending on tradition
Where to start
Christmas Trees
Real vs artificial, cost over time, allergies, and how to keep a tree alive all season.
Read the comparison →
🌲Tree Traditions & Care
Choosing, decorating, and the customs behind the tree — a full guide.
Read the guide →
🔴Ornaments
Salt dough, felt, and other handmade ornaments you can finish in an afternoon.
Browse ornament projects →
🌿Wreaths & Garlands
Fresh evergreen and candy cane wreaths for every door and mantel.
Browse wreath projects →
💡Christmas Lights
Indoor and outdoor lighting guides, plus where to see the best displays near you.
See the lights guide →
🍽️Table & Home Decor
Centerpieces, mason jar snow globes, and pine cone arrangements for the table.
Browse decor projects →
The order that saves the most work
Lights before ornaments, always — on the tree, on the mantel, on the bannister. It sounds obvious and almost everyone does it the other way round at least once, then spends twenty minutes lifting baubles off branches to thread a wire through. Work from the trunk outwards and from the top down, pushing the string deep into the tree in places rather than draping it round the outside; the depth is what stops a decorated tree looking flat after dark.
Do the tree first because it dictates everything else: once it's lit you can see what the room's colour temperature actually is, and whether the warm-white garland you bought clashes with the cool-white string already on the tree. Mixing colour temperatures is the single most common reason a room that looked lovely in the shop looks slightly wrong at home.
What to spend money on
Lights are worth buying well. Cheap sets fail one bulb at a time, and a string that dies in the middle of the season is either an evening of testing or a tree that has to be stripped. Ornaments are the opposite — a handful of good ones near eye level and the rest cheap or handmade reads exactly the same from across a room.
Fresh greenery is the best value decoration there is. A door wreath and a length of garland cost very little if you make them yourself, they smell like Christmas in a way nothing artificial manages, and they do the most visible work of anything on this list. The one catch is timing: cut evergreen has about four weeks indoors before it starts dropping, so make wreaths in December, not November.
Outdoors, briefly
Put outdoor lights up while it's still mild — late November, on a dry day — even if you don't switch them on until December. Clipping lights to a gutter in freezing rain is genuinely miserable and it's how people end up on ladders they shouldn't be on. Use clips rather than staples or nails, check every set is rated for outdoor use, and run everything through an RCD-protected socket.