The Exclamation Points of Christmas

[Dee Hardie's living room; House Beautiful 1983]

"I can't possibly imagine Christmas without a tree.

They are our constant Christmas glow,

our exclamation points throughout the house.

And we usually have three."

Dee Hardie

On my last post I showed you Dee Hardie's exterior entrance to her kitchen, every bit as charming now as it was 30 years ago. Today I'm showing you her living room in that same article in House Beautiful magazine. I put two magazine pages together to show her living room so it looks slightly skewed--but it gives you an idea of her style. (Remember, these pages were torn out of the magazine 30 years ago and are slightly worn.) Dee said that while many of her neighbors still had safe Williamsburg inspired living rooms, she lost her heart to one that reached much further back than 1983.

She was inspired by a photograph of Edith Wharton's living room in New York City, with it's garden of cabbage roses. After Dee's mother-in-law's furniture came down to her and her husband, she set her heart and mind on clothing it all in English chintz, Rosa Mundi the pattern. Can you get an idea of yellow and white stripes and rose and mauve cabbage roses in the picture above? I love it as much today as I did when I saw it in 1983.

And there is one of her three Christmas trees, the exclamation points, in her house. I'll show you the tree in her kitchen next week. This one is a little bit ladylike and classy, like the living room it sits in. Somehow I must have cropped out the green parrot that was the tree topper, a touch of whimsey on the tree. 

We don't have a Christmas tree in our living room. I did show you my bedroom tree on December 1, and Sunday I'll show you the tree in our family room that will have gone from having the pumpkins underneath it sported in our blog anniversary post on November 1 to a more Christmasy scene, and we'll hopefully buy a green tree this week if we don't get snowbound. But here is a Christmas tree that is a new one we put up this year, in my dressing room.

Now that tree is an exclamation point!

Why a tree in my dressing room? Simple. For years I've had two boxes of old Shiny Brite olive green ornaments that just did not go with our Christmas trees. This year with new green paint in my dressing room and bathroom was the chance I'd been waiting for to buy a tree for the green ornaments, so I chose a skinny champagne colored tree from Hobby Lobby.

And then I got a notice from eBay that my watch on Italian fish ornaments had turned up a match at last. I hoped to find some Italian fish to add to our main Christmas tree as we put it in the kitchen and I wanted Italian fish to go with the Italian fish pottery that I collect for the kitchen. What I got in the watch was not little fishes but these:

Ornaments with glitter fish "scales."

 They didn't look too fishy to me so I added these to my dressing room tree. There are pink ones, silver ones and a couple of pale blue.

I've played a little game when I've read Architectural Digest magazine over the years. The houses are so far beyond my pocketbook and frankly, if I had the money, the rooms themselves are not ones I'd be comfortable in. So as I read the magazine I ask myself, "If you could choose one house from this issue as a gift, free and clear, but you had to live in it for five years without changing a thing, which one would it be?" Do you know that in decades of playing this game, there was only one house that I could have survived living five years in without changing a thing?

Dee and Tom Hardie's Thornhill Farm, on the other hand, is one that would be no trouble at all to accept and live in for five years without changing a thing.

Is there a house that you've felt that way about? Even though you might like to add your own touch to some of the rooms, is there one that would definitely not be a hardship to live in unchanged for five years in order for it to be your own forever? Is there one that you could walk in with your pillow and your clothing and be at home?

Only four more days until the Tis the Season Blog Tour begins!