What you need is time, imagination and a small fortune. It helps to have a clean and pretty house to start with, too. Above all, hide your Christmas mess.
I picked up some ideas from the Homes for the Holidays tour, but shall have to rely on my memory as I wasn't allowed to take photos and someone all but confiscated my handbag too.
Greenery and vines. Wind vines around a balloon then pop the balloon to make those giant, decorative balls that can sit in the urns beside your front door, along with the your clumps of dogwood twigs and giant fir cones. Attach cypress or cedar branches to a stick to make a "tree" and dangle decorations from it. Use snippets of green cypress in all your flower arrangements, adding balls and golden wire or gilded leaves "for glitz". If you have glass candle holders that will fit inside glass vases, fill the outer space with water and drown your bits of green branch in this, along with some twigs with red berries attached, so that the candles will light them up but not set fire to them. Wedge a large branch across the top corner of a room, as long as you have a picture rail to stop it falling like a booby trap onto anyone passing below. Festoon garlands of cypress on stair rails and mantelpieces and cover your kitchen window sills with coniferous greenery. If you have garlands to spare from the indoor decorations, festoon them over your garden furniture.
Sticks and bark. Tie them together with a festive bow or create stars out of them (such a fiddly job that you are encouraged to buy some instead). If you can make flower pots out of birch bark, so much the better. You can put a row of amaryllises in them.
Feathers. A plethora of peacock feathers will enhance your flower arrangements (featuring orchids, heads of red roses, amaryllis blooms) or speckle your Christmas tree with red feathers. Wreaths made of feathers are highly desirable at this time of year.
Balls and vases. Balls can also be made of feathers. Glittery balls can become vases or candle holders, or you can cram as many red ones as possible into a vase, as a base for your dried flower & twig arrangements. Or you can fill a vase with glittery tissue paper for the same purpose. Or hundreds of miniature candy canes.
Angels, large. You see the angels and you think MUSIC, FLIGHT...! one of the ladies said. So if you're interested in either music or flight you should have them around because they'll go with your theme. Likewise ceramic birds and Santa Clauses.
Centrepieces for the dining table. It is important to have not just one centrepiece but three. Never put food on the table, or only for decorative purposes, such as red apples or heaps of cranberries. Food for eating is only to appear on the diners' plates.
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