Holiday Decor

When the dining table only seats four and there are nine of you, a sit-down Thanksgiving with every dish passed around isn’t going to work. A buffet does. Everyone fills a plate, finds a seat wherever there’s one (sofa, floor cushion, the arm of a chair), and the table is free for the food. The tricky part in a small apartment isn’t the food, it’s the traffic. Here’s how to set it up so people aren’t queuing through the kitchen while you’re trying to carve. ...

Taking Christmas down in the first week of January can leave a room feeling bare, right when it’s coldest and darkest outside. You don’t have to go straight from full Christmas to nothing. Take down what’s clearly Christmas, keep what’s just winter, and the apartment stays cozy until March. What comes down Anything red and green together Stockings, Santas, reindeer, nutcrackers Ornaments and the tree, if you had one Christmas-print pillows and towels Anything with “merry” or “noel” written on it Pack ornaments into a divided box (on Amazon) so they’re not broken next year, and wreaths into a wreath bag (on Amazon). ...

New Year’s Eve comes a week after Christmas, so most apartments are already half-decorated. The easiest New Year’s look starts with what’s already there, takes the red and green out, and adds gold and black. Keep the lights, change the rest Leave up any white string lights (on Amazon), garland and candles from Christmas. Take down stockings, Santas and anything red. Greenery with white lights already looks like a winter party; it doesn’t need to look like Christmas any more. ...

Decorating cookies is more fun than baking them, and it’s much more fun if the baking’s already done. The secret to a decorating afternoon that doesn’t end in frustration is doing nearly everything ahead of time, so the table is just cookies, icing and sprinkles. The day before Bake the cookies. A basic sugar cookie dough, rolled about a quarter inch thick and cut with simple shapes (on Amazon): trees, stars, stockings, round ornaments. Big simple shapes are easier for kids to decorate than fiddly ones. Let them cool completely on racks (on Amazon) and store them flat in a container overnight. ...

A small apartment is actually a good place for a holiday party. People stand closer, conversations overlap, and it feels busy with fewer guests. You just have to plan where people will stand, where the drinks go and where all the coats end up. How many people A rough guide: about one person for every 10 square feet of floor you can clear. A 300-square-foot living area that’s half furniture fits around 15 people standing, fewer if most of them want to sit. If you’re inviting more than that, plan for people in the kitchen too, because that’s where they’ll go anyway. ...

A full tree in a small apartment takes a corner of the room for a month and then a corner of a closet for the rest of the year. If that’s not worth it to you, there are plenty of ways to have something tree-shaped, or at least tree-like, that take up much less space. Things that stand on the floor or a table 1. Lit branches in a vase. A tall vase with battery-lit branches (on Amazon), or real bare branches with a strand of lights wound through. Hang a few light ornaments from them. It takes up about as much floor as a lamp. ...

Fall is when people start cooking more again, so the kitchen needs its counters. The trick is to put fall everywhere except where you chop: towels, the table, the tops of shelves and the windowsill. Towels The quickest change in any kitchen. Swap the dish towels and the hand towel by the sink for fall ones (on Amazon), or just plain rust, mustard or olive. You see them every time you wash a dish. Get a couple of extras; you’ll be using more. ...

Fall in a living room is mostly about texture and light, not orange. A room with heavier fabrics, lower lighting and a few natural things on the surfaces feels like autumn even without a pumpkin in sight. Then a couple of pumpkins on top of that look like a choice rather than a theme. Change the fabrics first Pillow covers. Swap two or three covers for something with texture: corduroy (on Amazon), wool, velvet, chunky knit. Rust, olive, camel and cream all work, and none of them shout “fall” so they can stay out until spring. Covers are cheaper than new pillows and store flat. ...

A hot cocoa bar is one of the easiest ways to make December feel like December, and it doesn’t need a big kitchen. It needs one flat surface, something that keeps cocoa hot, and a few jars of things to put on top. Where to put it Not on the kitchen counter you cook on. A bar cart, a sideboard, the end of a console or even a cleared shelf of a bookcase works. You need about two feet of surface: one foot for the cocoa and mugs, one foot for toppings. ...

The kitchen fills up right after Thanksgiving dinner. Everyone wants coffee at the same moment, someone can’t find the pie server, and whoever cooked is stuck by the sink trying to start the dishes. A dessert bar fixes most of that, and it doesn’t need to be fancy. Put pie, coffee and plates on a table in another room, set them out in a sensible order, and people serve themselves. That’s really the whole idea. The rest of this post is the details: where to put it, what order things go in, and how much pie to buy. ...