The dreaded event has come and gone: taking down the Christmas tree, and, with it, the garlands, wreaths, flower arrangements and candles that decorated our Southampton home for the Holidays. It always makes me a little sad, but sooner or later, I just have to pull up my socks, vacuum up the pine needles and move on. This snowy morning the house looked a little spare, but also clean, bright and ready for a new year.
It helped that the house wasn’t completely bare. I replaced red candles with pale green or white ones, there were pots of paperwhites still in full bloom for the kitchen and bedrooms, and we had a large white orchid on hand for a coffee table. Even a minimal back-up plan can help ease the post-Holiday blues.
I’ve saved until now the last arrangement I made from my San Francisco Holiday greens experiment because I think it’s a good candidate for post-Holiday decoration. It’s fresh, casual, understated and seasonally appropriate, but doesn’t look like something left over from a Christmas party. (As I detailed in my December 24 and December 28 posts, the parameters of this experiment were that all of the materials had to be purchased in one short outing to very convenient sources (the supermarket and the flower stand near the house), assembly had to be quick and straightforward, and the budget was $50.)
For this arrangement, I clipped branches of Bay short and arranged them loosely in a bright vintage enamel bowl, using a slice of floral foam to hold them in place. (For more on floral foam, see here.) The foam isn’t absolutely necessary, but it makes arranging plants and flowers in a wide-mouthed vessel much easier. Bay is common in California in winter, but other plants with dense, attractive foliage would do just as well: eucalyptus, boxwood, hypericum and lemon would all be nice. Rather than searching for something in particular, though, I would recommend dropping by a local flower shop and using the foliage they have on hand as inspiration for a fresh, simple arrangement to start the new year.
