Holiday Decorating: Keep Your Color Scheme from Halloween to New Year's Day

by
Elizabeth Ann Roy

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Living room decorated for the holidays with orange, black, red, green, gold, navy, and brown. Image created using Microsoft's Designer with Dall-E AI.

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table of contents

​Fall Falls Before and Follows After Halloween
Decorating for Halloween​
Transitioning from Fall to Thanksgiving
​​After Thanksgiving, Fall Back into Fall Again, or Fly into Winter
Decorating for Winter
Decorating for Kwanzaa
Decorating for Hanukkah
Decorating for Christmas
Decorating to Celebrate the New Year

Fall and and the coming of Halloween have me thinking about holiday decorating. Marilyn and I love decorating for the holidays we celebrate, but holiday decorating, gift buying, attending celebrations and planning them can begin to feel frantic instead of joyful. So, I've been thinking about the color palettes for fall, winter, and each of the holidays.

As I thought about how the holiday and seasonal color combinations transition from one to the other, I realized how easy holiday decorating can be. You can keep the same basic color scheme from fall and Halloween through to New Year's Day. You don't have to completely redecorate for each holiday. All that's needed is to change which colors you emphasize and which ones you use as accents.

 

Fall Falls Before and Follows After Halloween

Use the throw pillows to mix reds, rusts, yellows, orange and golds to echo the colors of autumn leaves. Earthy neutrals add to the autumn feel. If the fall colors feel to bright or dark to you, use neutrals like eggshell, ivory,  ecru, and light tan to tame and brighten them. For early fall, you could also begin to add a little green to your autumn palette. Keep the green around so you can add more for Christmas.

The orange sheers in the image above fit with a fall color scheme, but for a more subdued look, choose ecru, tan, or brown. Decorate a grapevine wreath with sprays of autumn leaves, bittersweet, wheat, and a bow made with wide ribbon in an earthy, solid color or print. Burlap or cotton craft ribbons are good choices.

In the spirit of quick and easy holiday decorating, this YouTube bowmaking tutorial from Kippi at Home demonstrates a simple way to make a beautiful bow for a wreath. Trust me, this method is a lot easier than the way I was taught to make a floral bow.

​If you want to make a fuller bow, add more loops. It you want a two-toned bow, form the loops with two different ribbons and fluff the loops of each color ribbon seperately. I once found a sheer earth-toned print ribbon and placed a solid brown ribbon under it to make a bow. 

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Decorating for Halloween

For Halloween, emphasize orange and black in your color scheme. This open space design room above anchors the Halloween color scheme with a polished black dining room table and black twin sofas. Sheer orange curtains frame the windows behind the sofas. If you don.t have a black table or sofa, cover your table with a black tablecloth and use black slipcovers on your sofa or settees to set the background for a similar look. 

Keep the throw pillows on the sofas. They support the orange and black color scheme, but add earthy neutrals, the colors of autumn leaves, and the red and green that you can use to transition to the following holidays. 

Start with a Halloween-themed wall hanging that you'll eventually replace with a wreath, and place gourds and small pumpkins, Halloween figurines, and other orange and black Halloween themed décor pieces around the room. Dried gourds can be hallowed out to make candleholders, and a large, dried hallowed out pumpkin can become a container for a table centerpiece.

​You'll find instructions for drying pumpkins and gourds by clicking on the link or visiting our sewing and crafts section. Drying the small pumpkins and gourds you might want to use for Thanksgiving, can take several weeks, so buy them as soon as they become available.

​When purchasing your Indian corn, consider whether you just want to buy three ears to make a wall hanging or shelf decoration or whether you want to buy enough to make a wreath.

If you want a taller floral arrangement for the mantle, consider mixing bittersweet with an ornamental grass like feather reed grass, northern sea oats, or maiden grass.

If you let a grapevine wreath soak overnight in your bathtub or another large tub, you can uncoil it and create a wallhanging in any shape you like. 

You may want to use a wire frame to support some shapes. However, if you want to create a swag, you can use floral wire to shape the uncoiled grapevines into a figure eight that measures approximately 36 inches (91.44 cm) across. Decorate the swag as you would a fall wreath.
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Falling Back to Fall

After Halloween, when it's time to switch back to fall, you can leave the gourds, pumpkins, and autumn-seasoned wreaths. Just remove decorations that are specifically for Halloween and tone down the emphasis on the orange and black. 

 

Transitioning from Fall to Thanksgiving

​Transitioning from fall to Thanksgiving may be the easiest transition to make. You've already switched to emphasizing earth-tone colors. You could rearrange your gourds so that they spill out of a cornucopia along with ears of Indian corn, sprays of wheat, and acorns or other nuts.

It's also time to fill your shelves with your turkey, Pilgrim, and Native American figurines. After all, if it weren't for the help of the Native Americans, the early settlers might not have survived. 

If you dried colorful Indian corn for your Thanksgiving decorations, you'll already have it tied to together. If you three ears tied together for a wall hanging, follow the YouTube video from Kippi at Home above to make a bow. Fasten the bow to your cluster of ears.

One way to display your Indian corn is to put a nail in an old board and hang the cluster from the nail. However, you could simply hang it on a picture hanger without the board. 

Yvonne Pratt of StoneGableBlog.suggests using a straw wreath as a base for making an Indian corn wreath. Covering a 14-inch (35.56 cm) wreath for a door takes 40 mini ears of the corn, but you may want a smaller wreath for some other area of your home.

Pratt leaves the wrapper on the wreath to avoid having straw fall off of the wreath. She arranges the corn with the tips of the ears even with each other and pointing to the inside of the wreath. The husks point to the outside.

​She uses a liberal amount of hot glue from a glue gun  to attach the Indian corn to the straw wreath. Indian corn already adds color, so a solid color ribbon acts as a perfect complement. 

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After Thanksgiving, Fall Back into Fall Again, or Fly into Winter

If winter weather hasn't arrived following Thanksgiving, you may want to leave your fall decorations out while you join in Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday shopping. On the other hand, you may be ready to celebrate winter and the winter holidays. Hanukka, Kwanzaa, and Christimas each have their own symbols and color schemes. In addition, each family has its own traditions. However, some may celebrate Festivus, not celebrate any holiday, or may move toward celebrating for the New Year. 

Decorating for Winter






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Decorating for Kwanzaa

The word "kwanzaa" comes from a Swahili phrase "matunda ya kwanzaaa" which means first fruits. The holiday, a celebration of African and Afican-American heritage, ancestry, and culture, draws on harvest and soltice ceremonies from the African continent. The symbols associated with Kwanzaa tie heritage and culture to The Seven Principles of Kwanzaa (Nguzo Saba). 

The seven-branched candelabra or Kinara, possibly the most familiar symbol of Kwanzaa, represents African ancestors. Together, the seven candles or Mishumaa Saba in the candelabra are reminders of the Seven Principles, one for each day of Kwanzaa. The colors of the candles come from the red, black, and green of the Black liberation flag, the Bendera Ya Taifa.

Red stands for the struggles faced by Black people. Black stands for pride in having a Black skin. Green stands for the promise and hope for the future. Consequently, as you face the Kinara, the three red candles are placed in the left arm and the three green candles are placed in the right arm with the single black candle in the center. 

With Kwanzaa's ties to harvest festivals, the natural elements you've brought into your home for fall and Thanksgiving fit well with the celebration of this holiday. A fruit tree, representing crops or Mazao and the idea of growth, is a common decoration.

Ears of dried corn are also common Kwanzaa decoration. Corn was a traditional African crop, so it, too, represents the principle of growth. You could use ears of dried sweet corn and follow the instructions above to make a wreath. On the other hand, even though Indian corn would not be a traditional African crop, you could choose ears with predominantly red and black kernels to bring color to your wreath, 

Two other key symbols of Kwanza are the unity cup or Kikombe cha Umoja and a woven mat or Mkeka. Unity or Umoja is one of the Seven Principles, but the Mkeka represents the foundation upon which the Seven Principles are built.

The other Seven Principle are self-determiantion or Kujichagulia, collective work and responsibility or Ujima, cooperative economics or Ujamaa, purpose or Nia, creativity or Kuumba, and Imani or faith. One way to celebrate Kwanzaa would be use creativity to find or produce art or other symbols that represent the Seven Principles in ways that are personally meaningful to you and your family and display those in your home.

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Decorating for Hanukkah



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Decorating for Christmas



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Decorating to Celebrate the New Year 



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