Outdoor Christmas Trees – Ideas for Display and Decor
Those who love to decorate for Christmas can never have enough of Christmas trees. Why not head outdoors and give yourself a chance to decorate another Christmas tree – an Outdoor Christmas tree? It is a great way to keep things seasonal and festive even in your outdoor area. We bring you some tricks of the trade and creative ideas for decorating and displaying outdoor Christmas trees.
1. Choosing your outdoor tree is the first decision you need to make. If you have living fir, spruce or small pine trees in your garden, you can decorate them as your outdoor Christmas trees. If you don’t, pre-lit artificial trees are great for the purpose.
2. You can make your outdoors Christmassy by displaying outdoor trees just like you have done indoors. Use lights and plastic weather-resistant ribbons for the trees and wrap some empty boxes with colored cellophane or plastic wrap to display underneath. Add some plastic toys and you have a festive outdoor corner. Keep in mind that all decorations used need to be waterproof.
3. Wish the birds in your garden a ‘Merry Christmas’ by decorating an outdoor Christmas tree for the birds and giving them their much-needed winter feed. Decorate the tree with birdhouses and other themed ornaments and place bird-feeders and seeds on them. String dried fruit slices to make ornaments. Cover pinecones with suet and seeds. Make garlands using slices of dried fruits, berries or popcorn.
4. If you love light displays, you can buy Christmas tree frames or create your own using tomato cages and the lighting them up for a gorgeous night time display.
5. For those living in warmer areas that do not receive snowfall, flocking your outdoor tree will give a lovely effect.
Saw your article come up on a Google search for decorating outdoor trees for Christmas. I’m looking for any ideas/advice. We have 12 (!) dwarf Alberta spruces (who apparently didn’t get the memo about being dwarfs) lining our front sidewalk to the front door. Some are about 5-8′ tall with one definitely closer to 8-9′. Needless to say they take up a lot of lights at Christmas and therefore look a bit pitiful when I can’t afford to keep buying light strings (the largest takes over 400 lights!). Now my kids have grown up and moved out it’s my job to string the lights, a frustrating and tiring job that last year left me in exhausted tears. You see, I only have to touch a string of lights to have them fail on me. Of course, they’re expensive so I buy the cheap $3-$5 strings and get what I paid for! Anyway, if you have any thoughts on alternative ideas to decorate them I’d appreciate it! Thanks!
Hi Silvia,
Have you tried decorating the outdoor spruces with something other than lights? You could save the lights for just the tree indoors and decorate outdoors with foil stars, ribbons or even natural bird-inviting decorations like birdseed garlands, birdhouses, apples etc. Alternatively, you could leave the trees green (as they are) and wrap their bases with bright red wide ribbon. If you would like a little lights on them, you can hang lanterns or luminarias which will be cheaper and take a lot less time to set up.