Creative Christmas Tree Decorating Ideas

Kevin Sharkey punctuated this 10-foot-high flocked tree with golden glass balls, then added new and vintage glass icicles. Cut felt serves as a tree-skirt-cum-snowdrift.

Pre-lit heavy flocked spruce (similar to shown), 9', $485, homedepot.com.

Crafts editor Silke Stoddard evokes a hygge holiday with her Christmas tree. When she recalls her childhood in Düsseldorf, Germany, the family used a natural minimalist design seen replicated here: a wooden-dowel tree with a mix of handmade straw and wood ornaments, bone-bead snowflakes and temari balls.

Kevin Sharkey's faux tree is bedecked in fuchsia, orange, and coral handblown glass balls. While it has a retro vibe (white flocked trees were all the rage in the '50s and '60s), the monochromatic effect is perfectly modernist.

Florist Emily Thompson shares her vision for a Christmas tree in an enchanted forest. A gargantuan Douglas fir sits on a mossy bed, trimmed with velvet ribbon and natural elements like spiky chestnuts, and pinecones, magnolia, spiny datura, and okra pods. The pièce de résistance is a teensy ladder fashioned out of birch and twine, and a bunny poised to join a winter-solstice party within the branches.

For collector John Derian, his love of Christmas antiques can be traced back to a faux tabletop tree he bought at a flea market more than a decade ago. This real one, placed antique spice canister, is carefully decorated with a mix of old ornaments and quirky handmade reproductions from the German company Nostalgie-Christbaumschmuck.

Channeling childhood summers spent on Cape Cod, crafts director Hannah Milman created a from-the-sea tree. These shell ornaments are dusted with two shades of glitter and blended for a dazzling ombre effect.

A tree covered in candy. Is there a child anywhere who could imagine a happier sight? Although the sweet bites and baubles on the tree are not intended to be eaten, their components look absolutely delectable.

Textured and touchable, appealing and approachable, everything on this tree will call out to a child's curious hands and heart. Best of all, nothing is too delicate or fragile.

Up the elegance of this year's evergreen with beautiful celestial symbols. Delicate silvery angels flit among hand-tied ribbon stars.

Forget the electric lights, make your room shine with an aluminum tree filled with removable branches and a central trunk. Decorate with balls and swags in one or two colors.

Colorful ornaments stand out against the dense branches of a Nordmann fir. This one has a vintage tree fence and a mound of fake snow at its base. The decorations include popcorn garlands, popcorn balls, and layered felt animals.

An entire village of gingerbread houses adorns this tree, creating tempting trimmings. The windows and doors have been crafted from dough that is different from the facades -- the lighter one is sweetened with honey, the darker with molasses -- to provide contrast.

Consider a monochromatic scheme. For this tree, we used only red and white ornaments to create a festive display.

In both Ukrainian and German lore, the tale of the Christmas spider explains the origin of tinsel. The story tells of a poor widow who couldn't buy fancy gifts for her children or decorations for their tree. One Christmas Eve, she decorated a tree as best she could with fruits and nuts. After she went to sleep, spiders came out and crawled over the tree, leaving their webs behind. When Father Christmas visited the house, he saw the web-covered tree and decided to turn the webs to silver. In the morning when the family awoke, the tree was sparkling and beautiful.

In Poland, where the Christmas season is seen as a time of renewal, ornaments are fashioned from straw to symbolize thanksgiving for the harvest and hope for good things in the coming year. Eggs represent the promise of future prosperity, too.

This tree gets its Christmas sparkle from the glass-bead ornaments.

A Christmas tree dusted with snow looks even frostier when decorated exclusively in shades of silver, white, and cream. Simple paper-and-glitter ornaments mix well with vintage metallic pieces. Glitter ornaments are easy to make and can be saved from year to year.

This is the perfect tree for gardeners. We turned vintage seed packets into templates you can download; print on card stock, and cut out with scissors.

Pom-poms, tassels, and snowflakes made of vibrant yarn create a cozy, crafty theme for a tree. A sewing basket is a fitting container (the tree sits in a separate pot surrounded by gravel); the gifts are wound with yarn.

With a few bags of cotton balls, you can blanket a tree with the softest snow.

With its pipe-cleaner candles, this small fir recalls a time when Christmas trees were brightened with flame.

Instead of store-bought trimmings, dress your tree with what it might have worn outside -- pinecones.

A group of Scandinavian designers in the 1960s envisioned the latter and produced not only glasses but also plates, pitchers, vases, and bowls that convincingly seemed to drip, crackle, and crystallize like ice. The result? Some of the coolest tableware to come out of the modern design movement. It’s hardly a coincidence that ice glass first surfaced in Finland and Sweden, lands full of glacial lakes and frozen fjords. “The work referenced icicles and bubbles and snow and all the textures of winter,” Martha Stewart Living collecting editor Fritz Karch says. “But the whole idea of using glass to create asymmetrical and wild natural forms was revolutionary.” In the postwar 1950s, big-name Scandinavian glass companies such as Iittala and Kosta Boda hired Finland’s top design talents, such as Timo Sarpaneva and Tapio Wirkkala, giving them the freedom to experiment and make unique glass pieces that ended up winning prizes in international competitions. Indeed, it was techniques developed in the 1950s to make one-off objets d’art that percolated down to the mass market.

Although plastic, this vintage tree demonstrates how influential the icy aesthetic was in the 1960s and '70s. Two of Ann Wärff's Snowball Votives, which were produced in several sizes, rest below the icicle boughs, completing the frozen tableau.

Snowball Votive candleholder set, $35 for 1, $60 for 3, kostaboda.us. Small Spin hurricane glass (used as tree base), $24, crateandbarrel.com. Saarinen end table, $599, roomandboard.com.