It's time to say no to christmas trends!

As a surface pattern designer, part of my job is watching for trends, so what I am about to say is ironic but it has to be said because this whole overconsumption mania has seriously gone out of hand and it is becoming especially problematic when it comes to urging people to discard their holiday decor every year...like Christmas will ever become outdated! This is why I am saying it out loud :

It's time to say no to Christmas trends!

Every year it's a new fad, there was the pink Christmas trend, the Scandinavian Christmas fad, which disturbingly was also a sad beige aesthetic thing where people pretended that a Christmas without colors was the way to go. There has been the mid-century modern Christmas with stores selling you vintage style looking ornaments at a premium when in reality thrift stores or your grand parent's attic had them all along. This year the trend is "Ralph Lauren Christmas" which as a late Gen X I find hilarious because that's really just the stuff that has been part of Christmas all through my childhood and teenage years : lots of red, green and gold, some plaid in those colors, and a vintage feel to it. Except that once again, in the name of consumerism we are going to get people to buy it all new. Influencers are all up in arms on TikTok (which is thankfully banned in India) and Instagram giving you tips to get your Ralph Lauren Christmas together. Some apparently even encourage people to hide the gifts that do not match the aesthetic at the back of the Christmas tree as the very excellent Kiki Chanel denounce in this YouTube video. All in all, it's just one other trend destined to get Gen Z to buy, buy and buy some more, while missing on the whole point of Christmas decor : story telling and nostalgia.

Let your Christmas Decor be a family story

Growing up, I remember our tree having lots of ornaments coming in all colors. I was born in 1979 and my parents had been building their collection of ornaments in the 70s and 80s. We also had lots of tinsels and I mean LOTS, the tree was almost drowned in it. We still used to light real candles on a real tree (a bit of a fire hazard). The nativity scene had store bought figurines but the manger was hand made by my dad. Toward the end of the 80's a lunatic lit a fire in the storage basement of our apartment building and we lost the vast majority of all that Christmas decor a few weeks before Christmas! My parents bought new stuff, a mix of glittery 80s stuff and the emerging now dubbed Ralph Lauren Christmas stuff. The Christmases of my 90s were pretty much was is trendy now. When I moved out of my parents' home into my very tiny studio all I had space for was a wreath hung to my window, and I decorated it with orange, pink and gold ornaments and bows. That was all before moving to India in 2003.

The first few years in India were the hardest when it came to Christmas, I dealt with culture shock and the fact that the very few Christmas ornaments and trees I could find where all pretty cheap looking and didn't do a good job at evoking the memories of my childhood. Ask any immigrants from any culture in any country and they will tell you that they will ALL struggle recreating the festive spirit of their home country. Not faith, no culture is spared. For me, it was Christmas that was the most brutal. I remember decorating a small potted Juniper tree we had with tinsel one year. Each time I found an ornament I liked I would buy it, and the first few years it went to decorate the grill (iron bars) in our living room's window. I got excuited the first year I found a potted poinsettia. And after a few years we finally found a decent looking Christmas tree and bought a few semi-decent ornaments to go with the few quality ones I had been collecting, it was the year I was pregnant, 17 years ago! Fast forward to now, we are at our second tree, which also has a very fun story that started 11 years ago when our cat destroyed the old one bringing complete panic to my then 5 years old who was convinced Santa would skip our house because the cat destroyed the tree.

Our tree speaks a story, the story of my moving to India, the story of our multicultural family and every single ornament on it, bought or made over the years has a story. EVERY SINGLE ONES! I am not joking here, because even the generic plastic baubles speak of a time I learned to make peace with Christmas being different, or the fact I needed more filler ornaments after our cat killed the older, smaller tree and I bought a bigger tree in a rush. The tree bear ornaments made with my daughter which we made with other European friends over the years. Then there are all the ones I made with the kids attending my art classes and continue to make every year. There are the special store bought ones I bought too, all with a story, all keeping with a tradition of building our family memory tree, and family holiday decor, like this little guy :

We bought this one in 22, the year we bought a new car and the the year I decided to give driving in India a go and got my Indian driving license. The advent calendar which is no more was a DYI project I made out of cardboard tubes and re-used every year. my daughter outgrew the concept and the cardboard tubes having seen better day were retired after 7 or 8 Christmases. The tiny white tree with beads on the left? That's a gift from my daughter on Christmas day, she bought it one year when she went shopping with my husband. Trends have no space in our holiday decor, I tend to stick to red, white and green because I like those colors for Christmas, but I have several ornaments that do not match that color theme at all, and they are as much part of the story as the one who do. If we like something any given year, we buy just that one piece and it becomes part of our family, ready to be displayed year after year, trends be damned! For the record, I remember exactly ONE Christmas when my mom insisted we do an elegant pastel pink and white tree when I was a kid, it was before the storage basement fire and that was the year I hated the tree. It sparked no joy to my I think 6-7 years old self, it was refined, probably trendy at the time, but it was also very sterile and said nothing about family. There was no Instagram back then, but the vibe it gave was the same half of those super curated Instagram posts give nowadays. It was too perfect, too polished and at the complete opposite of what Christmas really is all about.