New house provides a fresh canvas for Christmas decorating

For 23 years, Danell Oxler’s holiday-season nighttime routine involved reading in bed by the Christmas lights shining into her bedroom window from the eaves of her College Hill house.

It was an especially cherished habit, because “I have a Christmas problem,” Oxler said.

So when she and her husband, Mark, moved to a ranch house in Eastborough in May, long before the holiday season ever rolled around, Danell knew she wanted to somehow replicate the Christmas light that used to come into her second-floor bedroom.

“Our bed was right in front of the windows. I knew I was going to miss that,” Oxler said. So she came up with the idea of building an arbor over the headboard of the bed, and stringing it with lights.

“That’s something I always wanted to do — decorate my bedroom,” she said. “But it was on the second floor, and nobody went up there.”

Now with the all-accessible ranch house — and the fact that the Oxler house is on a holiday homes tour for the members of their church — the master bedroom, and every other room as well, is decorated floor to ceiling for Christmas.

“It’s my love of Christmas and the decorating that made me agree” to being on the tour, she said, pointing to collections of Christmas stuff stretching back not only to her grown children’s childhoods but to her own, and to new purchases, and to fresh glittery creations of her own making.

Oxler has had the help of equally creative family members and members of Blessed Sacrament Church to help her decorate with both polish and originality. Evergreen garland and florals — fresh and faux — crown doorways and light fixtures, and even a shower curtain in one of the bathrooms is dressed for the season with red ball ornaments hung from the grommets.

A manger in every room

In addition to bringing in the bedside Christmas light, Oxler had another goal for her new house: to have a Nativity in every room. To meet it, she not only has drawn on her own extensive collection but also has bought some new ones — of course — and borrowed from relatives.

“I can’t believe they found one that kind of looks like it’s snowy,” says Oxler’s daughter Emily Scott. The snowy Nativity is set up on a makeshift pedestal opposite the arbored bed in the master bedroom. The room is done all in the Christmas white that’s trendy this year, from the birch wood of the arbor to snowy new linens to another Nativity-themed feature: large figures depicting the Flight Into Egypt that stand dramatically against glass doors that open to the backyard.

There are a couple of settings in the house that are naturals for manger scenes: a long narrow table in the entry hall that holds Oxler’s mother-in-law’s extensive ceramic set, and at the foot of a large gold panel on a living room wall featuring a classic Fra Angelico angel. That Nativity is at child’s level and is made of sturdy resin.

“I think it’s important that kids can play with their Nativities,” Oxler says. Her grandchildren also have their own sets of Fisher-Price Nativities. “I love to hear them talk about ‘Mama Mary’ and ‘Baby.’ ”

Scott, along with Oxler’s other daughter, Gretchen Postiglione, is creative like her mom, and all of them like to strike out on artistic projects to see how they turn out.

Scott, on the verge of giving birth herself, made an origami Nativity for a display of book art that her mother dreamed up for a natural place: built-in bookshelves in the family room. Oxler cleared the books out and made room for lolling ornaments and decorated books. The origami Nativity fit in with the papery theme, and was deepened to such an extent that Postiglione printed prayers and passages specific to each character on the 11-by-17 pieces of paper from which Scott made the Nativity. The paper that has been folded into the figure of Mary, for example, has the Hail Mary prayer on it, while the Guardian Angel prayer can be read on the figure of an angel. “We’re the only ones who know it,” Oxler said. She made a Bethlehem backdrop for the Nativity by enlarging a silhouette she found online and cutting it out of black construction paper.

Christmas book art

Oxler had dabbled in book art before, and decided to expand on her previous projects for the family-room bookshelves.

“I go to Bookaholic, and they have 10 books for $10, and I buy them for the color. We just went and got red books for this project.” She also makes sure there are no pictures in the books.

She created one type of book art by tracing a word across the textblock of the book and folding each page according to the outline of the word, so that when the book is set with the pages facing out, you can read “Joy” in one and “Peace” in another.

Oxler also cut snowflakes out of book pages to display on the front of red books, and cut letters out of red construction paper to put on the textblocks of books to spell out “Noel” and “Hope.” For one of the bedrooms, she used striped Christmas wrapping paper to cover several books that sit on a shelf.

Oxler grew up seeing those crafty Christmas trees made out of folded magazines, and made a couple of similar trees out of books.

“I like something that not everybody is going to have, that you can’t go buy — not that I don’t have a lot of stuff that you buy, because I do. I like unique. Even if it’s stuff that you buy, I prefer the unique stuff.”

One of the unique additions to the new house this Christmas is a kids’ tree in the sunroom. “I wouldn’t have thought to put big toys on a Christmas tree,” Oxler said. But her sister, Diana Mark of Valley Center, did. Mark even made a star of Tinkertoys as a topper, and used a Slinky as garland. A big Christmas book that belonged to Oxler as a child is tucked in among the branches, and blocks have been turned into ornaments.

“She always had those collections and toys and she’s always had those on display somewhere,” Oxler’s daughter Emily said. “But between the purchases and the new house, she’s really done some new stuff. … It’s a mixture of old and new, but she definitely reinvented the wheel a little bit in most of the things in the house.”

An arbor of birch

Oxler’s sister is the one who helped her bring the arbor into reality.

They used two birch logs for the sides, and attached short pieces of birch near the tops of the logs to create a Y on each for holding a crosspiece. But they couldn’t find a birch limb long enough to go across the headboard. So they took a length of quarter-round and wrapped it in birch ribbon so you can’t tell the difference. Then they draped it with white-stringed white lights and a garland of flocked twigs, and hung lighted mercury-glass and frosted-glass icicles on it. Mark Oxler attached the bracketing logs to a slat from an old set of window blinds and placed it under the wheels of the bed frame to stabilize the arbor.

“She had a vision of doing that,” Scott said. “I think it looks so beautiful.”

Glitter everywhere

Oxler didn’t overlook any area for Christmas decorating. A kitchen wall begged for some seasonal artwork, so “I glittered a big canvas with trees. It worked out really well,” she said. First she hung the blank canvas and then projected an outline of the trees onto it. She then traced the outline, filled it in with Mod Podge glue, and sprinkled glitter over the glue. She had to work in sections, because the glue dries too fast to do it all at once.

On an adjacent wall, ornaments connected to fishing line hang inside frames that have been gilded with glitter.

With all the beauty of Christmas surrounding her, Oxler already is dreading a post-holiday letdown. When it comes time to clean up, she will take photos of each display, place storage boxes on the floor in front of each display, then put the decorations in the boxes with the photo of the contents taped onto the inside of the lid. “My daughters say, ‘It takes away the fun each year.’ I don’t have time. Sometimes I just want to to get it up, and if I want to get creative I can.”

It’s hard to imagine her not wanting to. But she may not need to after this year.

This story was originally published December 3, 2015 at 6:17 PM with the headline "New house provides a fresh canvas for Christmas decorating."