We are not fans of the poinsettia, but still like to fill the house with holiday cheer. So how do you get festive without the obligatory Christmas plant?
How about doing it with fruit? Pomanders in a big bowl can ring in holiday cheer like nothing else- especially if you can make them look as chic as Ms. Stewart does.
Also, ever since experiencing the thrill of the great NYC restaurant Bouley some years ago we have been obsessed with the genius way they started our senses going by filling the small entry with bushels of aromatic apples.
Ever since, we often pass by the flowers, instead spending $20 on a bunch of fuji’s or bosc pears or whatever smells best (remember to sniff that fruit before you by it, people). The fruit goes in a huge bowl and give us as much color, smell and beauty as most cut flowers can. And nothing gets us moe into the holidays than the smells of food and the kitchen.
I also love the look of large cinnamon sticks in glass cylinder vases, and silver containers of any kind with fresh (raw?) chestnuts.
(I must be the late night poster...)
I can smell the cinnamon sticks...yum.
I still enjoy icey green grapes in a crystal champagne bucket. Overflowing. You can do the lime juice egg wash thing before freezing and have vanilla votives around the bucket. Subtle scent but nice.
I think I've made everything (its my calling) and I've made pomanders. Cloves. Sharp. Nasty things. (ooh...maybe that's why I ended up doing jewelry...) Make 2 pomanders and you've had the equivalent of 20 guitar lessons in one day. The little tender tips of your fingers are not happy. But the room is....
Martha Stewart, who I totally respect as a business genius with useful ideas, sucked all the fun out of crafts imho.
We used to have a raucus goodtime making a bunch of these when I was a kid . . .
I think we'd use a nail or a skewer or something to make the holes so we didn't kill our fingers on the cloves too much. And I have a vague recollection of powdered clove being employed, over the whole thing . . .
I am a fan of doing large glass bowls or stacked pedestals/compotes filled with sugared fruit. ( Just do an egg wash on the fruit and dust with sanding sugar.) I also like glittered nuts in bowls, etc.
A great way to make the apt smell festive is to heat up a pot with water, orange peel, cloves, and cinnamon sticks.
(ok so I stole these ideas from Martha!)
Guido, I think the giant fun-sucking-out effect of The Martha is because she often turns fairly simple projects into elaborate production numbers. In Martha-land, you can't just stick a clove in an orange: you have to worry about what kind of orange provides the most lasting scent, and whether you should use domestic or imported cloves, and whether to adapt the pattern from Ukrainian egg-painting or from 19th-century wallpaper patterns. By the time one has earned a Ph.D. in orange-cloving, Christmas is long over.
P(too)'s cinnamon-sticks-in-glass-jar are just about what I can handle, especially as the glass jar can be used for something else later.
Wende, you are a hoot!
FYI, we made the pomanders in the "Happy Holidays from AT LA" post above in a very short time, by just "winging it", which is VERY un-Martha, we know. We didn't get special oranges, we didn't score the skin first, we just had fun trying to copy Martha's patterns, and we LOVE the way our pomanders turned out!