Creating Outside Our Comfort Zone ... with Holiday Decorating

It's once more the time of year where, for many of us, large evergreen trees suddenly appear in places they have no Earthly business being, ribbons and bows festoon everything in sight, and hundreds of little tiny lights in myriad colors glow through the dark.  Yes, my friends, the season of holiday decorating is upon us.

While I love a nice Christmas tree and am okay with ribbons and bows, what I really love are the lights.  I've been enamored of Christmas lights (and in particular exterior holiday illumination, as Chevy Chase calls it in Christmas Vacation) even since I was a small boy.  My parents' house became my canvas when I was in middle school, and also became one of the brightest spots around the neighborhood thanks to their support of my eccentricity, as well as their willingness to buy me seemingly endless strings of twinkle lights (and to pay the electric bill incurred as a result of powering them).  To this day, my wife and I (and now our son) go over the day after Thanksgiving and cover the house, bushes, trees, ornamental grasses, and even a random shepherd's crook with lights.

Oh yes, and the charcoal grill -- can't forget that.  If it's large and stationary, we'll cover it with lights.

Now that I'm grown and have a place of my own, I get to decorate two houses with lights, not just one.  The landscapes are vastly different, the size and scope of the houses are different ... and both afford me a tremendous chance to be creative in my decorating.

About half the lights in the back yard ... can't really get them all in one shot without renting a helicopter.

Many of us, sadly, find one way to decorate our homes for the holidays, and we do so the same way year after year with few, if any, variations.  Yet this annual event gives us a chance to flex our creative muscles in a way that few of us (outside of professional interior designers) get to practice on a regular basis.

For me, the challenge of outdoor lights is several fold.  There's the overarching plan -- what is the general effect I want to go for?  There's the artistic effect -- do I want fun and festive, or do I want more subdued and dignified?  There's the large logistics -- just because I put lights on something doesn't mean they'll light up, so how do I get power to them?  There's the minute logistics -- if I want lights in this tree, how do I reach up there to get them there?
 

All of these aspects come together to give a nice, unified presentation, but for any part of the decorating I do, I have to be thinking simultaneously on all these levels.  In that way, it's really no different than what I would do while writing a novel or composing a piece of music -- are we Creatives not constantly thinking on three or four levels about our work, making sure everything comes together with seemingly no effort?  The only difference here is the focus of our thoughts and energy.

As you put your decorations and displays together this year, see if you can be creative in how you do so -- put things in a new location, arrange them differently, group them differently, even create a brand new decoration.  Not only will it add joy and beauty to your house, but it just might stretch those creative muscles, too.