The holiday centerpiece literally lies at the core of your home’s Christmas decorations. It can take on nearly endless forms, limited only by your creativity and the overall holiday look you are aiming for.
To help you design a holiday centerpiece and make it truly your own, we’ve put together some examples and tips on how to create a centerpiece that matches your style. Whether your home is modern, traditional or a hip urban apartment, you can make it merry with the right holiday centerpiece.
Winter Traditional
To create a traditional holiday look, we recommend going natural: using evergreens, fruits, and flowers, along with candles and other nostalgic elements.
For our example winter traditional centerpiece shown in the video above (and in the pictures here), we used:
- Fresh decorative greens
- Bountiful collection basket
- Candles of different sizes
- Seasonal fruit
- White lilies
- Homemade gift tags
Of course, you can make it unique by substituting your own ideas or elements that you have on hand. Some general tips and tricks to keep in mind when creating a traditional look:
- Color is key. For example, mixing evergreens and red fruit give you the traditional holiday colors.
- When using smaller objects in your arrangement, place them in groups of twos or threes to create focal points and keep them from looking sporadic.
- Don’t be afraid to tape off and paint plain candles to create holiday stripes or patterns.
Mod Holiday
For a mod look, the focus is on clean lines, bold colors, and symmetry.
We included a lot of silver, including some homemade “aluminum” trees created from balsa wood and silver spray paint, as shown in the video.
For our mod holiday centerpiece, we used:
- Tapered candles on silver candlesticks
- Tealights
- Blue glassware (as vases)
- Autumn road bouquet
- Red tulips
- Cranberries
- Peppermint candy
- Retro accents
- Homemade silver trees
Some tips that can be helpful when creating a mod holiday centerpiece:
- You can create your own geometric accent pieces, such as pyramids and cubes, by using simple paper templates (such as these) painted to look metallic, or by using spare tree ornaments.
- Don’t be afraid to use found objects from around your home or garden, such as the berries we found growing on a bush in the home’s backyard.
- Similarly, we made easy tealight candleholders using small vessels we found (in this case, vintage Jell-O molds) and filling them with cranberries or candies.
Urban Apartment
Of course, not everyone has a big table or a large space to work with. Even the smallest apartment has room for a right-sized holiday centerpiece.
Our urban apartment centerpiece focused on bringing in small natural elements, neatly contained within clear glass globes.
The materials we used:
- Peace and prayers bouquet
- Airplant terrarium globe
- Modern succulent terrarium
- Woodland animal toys
- Clear ornament globes
- Assorted clear glassware
Some tricks you can utilize to make the most of a small space:
- Go vertical. We hung airplant globes and a glass ornament from the ceiling for a different take on the centerpiece idea.
- As with the mod centerpiece, we used spray paint to transform simple objects—in this case, plastic toys were painted white to create fun decorative elements.
- Large flowers can be cut short to fit into small containers.
Whatever your style or surroundings, you can create a holiday centerpiece to make your home merry and bright.
Please feel free to pin and share with your friends, or share your own holiday centerpiece design tips! Make sure to check out our assortment of Christmas flowers, winter plants, and Christmas decorations.
