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Christmas decorations with herbs, plants, and fruits

Create decorations, wreaths, garlands, centerpieces

The end-of-year holidays are just around the corner: how are your preparations going? If you haven’t found the time or the right inspiration yet, we’re here to give you some last-minute tips for getting your Christmas decorations ready. Classic or fabulous, monochrome or colorful, minimalist or opulent: the choice is yours, depending on your taste and the setting.

In this article, we offer some ideas that may inspire you to make Christmas decorations for indoors and outdoors. The common thread is the use of natural materials—what the garden, countryside, woods, and beach have to offer—to create unique and personalized Christmas decorations.

DIY Christmas decorations made from wood and other natural materials

You can collect some of these materials throughout the year, whenever the opportunity arises: for example, while doing gardening or during a walk. Store them away from moisture and dust until you are ready to get to work.

What can you use to make DIY Christmas decorations? Here is a rough list; it’s not exhaustive, merely a starting point:

Evergreen twigs with red or white Christmas berries, such as holly, butcher’s broom, and mistletoe. Be careful with berries, as some are toxic to humans and pets (this is the case with holly and mistletoe).
Sprigs of other evergreens: not just the classic fir and pine, but also cypress, ivy, eucalyptus, juniper, thuja, and so on. You can also use less common evergreens, such as orange/lemon, strawberry tree, and myrtle.
Sprigs of aromatic herbs such as bay leaf and rosemary.
Dried fruit of various colors and shapes: slices of orange, but also lime, apple, pear, kiwi, and the exotic star fruit.
Dried citrus peels.
Nuts: peanuts, chestnuts, walnuts…
Dried flowers: such as helichrysum, heather, lavender, honesty coins (lunaria plant seed pods), hydrangea, sea lavender. Simply gather them in bunches in the summer and hang them up by their stems to dry.
Small fruits: Japanese lantern berries with their red-orange husks, rose hips, mandarins, dwarf pomegranates, wild apples.
Spices: star anise and cinnamon sticks.
Wood: driftwood, pruning debris, etc.
Other: leaves, acorns, moss, pieces of bark, pine cones... Everything you collect should be cleaned of dirt and debris and dried thoroughly.

Speaking of branches: to obtain the raw materials for your Christmas decorations, here is a feature on how to prune conifers and an overview on pruning evergreens. For the former, we recommend hand tools, or chainsaws or pruners, as applicable, and for the latter, hedge trimmers as well.

Christmas decorations with dried oranges and much more

Let’s start with Christmas decorations made with dried oranges. Dehydrating oranges at home is easy: just slice them and absorb excess juice with paper towels. Leave the slices on the radiator for a few days, or shorten the time by dehydrating them in the oven, microwave, or using a food dehydrator. The process is similar for apples and other fruits.

Use the dried orange slices to make various decorations:

Decorations for the Christmas tree.
Decorations for centerpieces, wreaths, and garlands.
Place cards and napkin rings for the table.
Accessories for wrapping gift packages.

They are also an essential ingredient for making potpourri to fragrance your home during the festive season, or to give as gifts. You can use orange peel in the same way—as well as the peel of limes, mandarins, grapefruits, etc.—once you have cut it into shapes using cookie cutters or a knife, and dried it on a radiator or in the oven.

You can use the dried orange slices and peels for your Christmas decorations on their own or together with other elements: spices, pine cones, pieces of bark, twigs, etc. To join them together, all you need is a little hot glue, or tape, raffia, string, or thin bendable wire. The same principle applies to other dehydrated fruit, nuts, dried flowers, berries, cinnamon sticks, pieces of driftwood, pine cones, etc. You can also use these elements in their natural state or color them—or just dust them with a little white, gold, or red.

Outdoor Christmas decorations with wreaths and garlands

To make a Christmas wreath using only branches, collect long, flexible twigs from pruning scraps, without leaves and without many buds, preferably fresh as they are easier to work with:

Bend a very long branch into a circle and close it by weaving the ends together.
Wrap the remaining branches one at a time, always following the same direction, until the wreath is the desired thickness.
Use shears to remove excess branch pieces and any excess buds.
Insert sprigs of evergreen or bunches of dried flowers into the gaps between the intertwined branches.

You don’t need string, wire, or anything else to hold it together: your Christmas wreath is ready, and you can hang it with raffia or ribbon, or use it as a centerpiece.

You can use a wreath made of only branches as an alternative to thick wire or the special ring bases you can buy—made of straw, polystyrene, florist’s foam, or other materials—which we talked about in the article on DIY Christmas wreaths.

To decorate your wreath, all you have to do is let your imagination run wild. You can attach evergreen twigs with or without berries to the base and add decorative elements of any kind, securing them with thin wire: dried fruit, spices, bunches of berries, small fruits, pinecones, leaves, pieces of wood or bark... You can go for a rustic or elegant wreath. You can give it more or less movement by varying shapes, sizes, heights, and selecting decorative elements accordingly. You can choose just one type or focus on one color, or have a little of everything. You can use just a few or go all out. There are no rules, except that the result should be balanced. Instead of evergreens to cover the base, you can use moss and then arrange the decorations. If you prefer a less traditional Christmas wreath, you can fill the base with dried flowers only.

A wreath to hang on the door is perfect if you want a Christmas symbol but have limited space in your home, and the same can be said for garlands. Use them as outdoor Christmas decorations to frame doors and windows, to embellish windowsills or balcony railings, and so on. Inside the house, you can hang them along the staircase handrail or on the fireplace mantle, for example.

You can make a simple, lightweight garland with sprigs of evergreen gathered in a bunch tied with thin wire—disguised with a ribbon or raffia bow—to hang upside down. For a more “textured” garland, proceed as follows:

Overlap the twigs, either of the same type or mixed, from largest to smallest, aligning them at the point where they were cut.
Tie them together with wire at this end and, if necessary, at the center of the arrangement as well.
If you want, add decorative elements, securing them with wire: pine cones, clusters of real berries, etc.
Finish the garland with a ribbon and hang it upside down to decorate the door, instead of the classic Christmas wreath.

Alternatively, you can create a long garland, like a boa:

Prepare identical bunches of evergreen twigs with or without berries, pine cones, etc.
Place a piece of thick string on the table and wrap it at one end with thin wire (do not cut it, leave it attached to the spool until you have finished).
Tie the first bunch to this end of the string with wire.
Continue by attaching the other bunches to the string, orienting them in the same direction as the first.
Arrange the last bunch in the opposite direction to “close” the garland and tie it to the string.

If you want a very long garland, prepare several segments by repeating these steps and then join them together.

Christmas centerpiece on a plate and in a vase

To make a Christmas centerpiece, you can create a wreath as described above, or you can consider other options. Arrange the mandarins in a pyramid on a plate, tray, or cake stand, then fill in the gaps between them and cover the edge of the plate with sprigs of conifer, butcher’s room with its berries, and small pine cones. You can replace the mandarins with wild apples or dwarf pomegranates, perhaps using a little hot glue or toothpicks to hold them in place.

Again using a plate or similar, create a Christmas centerpiece using a florist’s foam block in which to insert sprigs of evergreen, just one kind or many, natural or colored. Add contrasting elements such as clusters of berries and pinecones; alternatively, you can use dried or dehydrated fruit, spices, small fruits, twigs, etc., following the same compositional criteria we suggested for Christmas wreaths. Complete the ensemble with candles. If you want to give your centerpiece a particular shape, use a shaped florist foam block, for example, a cone or a sphere.

Finally, as a Christmas centerpiece, you can prepare a vase of decorative branches:

Fill a fairly tall clear vase with pinecones or dried fruit.
Select some attractive branches without leaves and place them in the vase.
Decorate them with pendants made from dried fruit, small apples, pomegranates, and so on.

We began this article by talking about personalized Christmas decorations made from natural materials, which you can find in your garden or in the countryside, for example. As we have seen, you can use them to decorate wreaths and garlands, to decorate a Christmas table, and to wrap gifts. Of course, you can also use these decorations to decorate your Christmas tree.

Here, we won’t try to settle the debate between real and artificial trees: you can find our article on Christmas trees discussing this topic. However, starting with natural or recycled materials, we want to give you some ideas for creating an alternative Christmas tree, which is only reminiscent of the real thing in shape. To stylize a Christmas tree, you can use, for example:

Boards and blocks obtained from dismantling pallets.
Planks, beads, slats, etc. left over from DIY carpentry work.
Branches collected after pruning or during a walk in the woods.
Wood that has been washed up on the beach by the sea.

The tradition of the Christmas tree goes hand in hand with that of the nativity scene. On that note, let’s wrap up by reminding you that a chainsaw is not “just” a tool for pruning, cutting wood, and doing DIY jobs, but also for making wood carvings: we talked about this in this piece on how to carve a DIY nativity scene for the garden.