The Decorating Progresses...

Well, I have to admit that we are a bit behind here at Darlington in our decorating. As I mentioned in an earlier posting we are having a cocktail party this year, on the 29th, so our primary focus has been on getting Darlington ready for the party, as opposed to having everything buttoned up by Christmas day. We succeeded in having the tree decorated by Christmas, but we’re still working on finishing up the rest of the decorating for the party.

 

Rich and Junior hanging the roping on the portico

Our goal this year has been to make the house festively “Holiday” rather than “Christmas”, since the party is taking place after Christmas and before the dawning of the New Year. Neither Boy nor I particularly care for houses decorated for Christmas so abundantly as to replicate a retail experience: themed rooms smothered in artificial garlands covered with baby’s breath, twinkling lights, teddy bears and miniature ballerinas. I don’t aspire to live in the Christmas Shoppe at Macy’s. What I do like are rooms that are, if anything, under-decorated. Real greens, vintage ornaments, candles, and not too much of them. And where the colors of the decorations, rather than imposing a relentless theme of red and green, complement the rooms in which they appear. That is what you’ll find at Darlington.

Polishing the brass andirons and fire tools

Since we won’t be finished with our decorations for several more days I thought that I would post some photos of our work in progress, ahead of the completed installation. These should provide context for when I post the final photos.

Setting up to decorate the pruned tree

Decorating the tree, thinning as we go to make room for more ornaments

Like many old houses the front door at Darlington is no longer used as the primary entry, having been supplanted many years ago by the less-formal side entry as the main source of entering and exiting the house. Several years ago we decided to set up the center hall at Darlington as a bar area during parties when the crowd is large enough to require the services of a professional bartender. We had our carpenter construct a bar for us that we place in front of the door during large parties. Dressed with linens it makes a delightful bar and aids in the circulation of guests between the adjoining rooms. When not in use we store it in one of our barns.

The bar and linens awaiting final set up

The new Dietz No. 80 Blizzard Cold Blast lanterns, ready to line the drive during the party

My Darling Clementine(s)

This is my favorite time of year. Sure, I like Christmas and all that, but what I really love . . . are clementines! And not just any ones, but those that are shipped in a charming little wood crate with "Darling Clementines" printed on the label.

It's a silly play on the sentimental, mawkish, old song "Oh My Darling, Clementine!" about a 49-er miner's drowned daughter. And so, of course, the "Darling" on the label bears no relation to your's truly. That notwithstanding, every year I look forward to finding these tasty clementines in the grocery store and am always delighted to take them home with me. Popping a section of one of these easy-to-peel, little early-winter pleasures from Spain in one's mouth is--for me at least--a particularly Proustian experience.  It's hard to eat just one--thankfully, several dozen come in each box! 

The chorus to the mournful song takes on a decidedly new meaning, when considering where these little darlings wind up . . .

Oh my darling, oh my darling,
Oh my darling, Clementine!
Thou art lost and gone forever,
Dreadful sorry, Clementine!

A Christmas Gift for Pompey

This year our present to Pompey was a dog bed for the master bedroom that Boy had made in a handsome ticking from Rogers & Goffigon. Last evening we lit a fire in the bedroom's fireplace, and the three of us sat in the room, reading aloud. Pompey enjoys his new bed, but as you will see he prefers to push his tushie up against the firescreen for a good baking.

"Hmmm . . . this new bed is comfy"

"The bed is OK, but this is nicer -- good and hot!"

Tomorrow: photos of the decorations at Darlington . . .

Photos by Boy Fenwick

A Christmas Greeting From Long Ago...

...and from those of us today at Darlington House

The Decorating Begins...

After our less-than-successful efforts of non-decorating at Darlington last weekend, Boy and I were determined to right this mess, and with new-found zeal plotted out our trip to the flower district in Manhattan to pick up the necessary greens to decorate our house and make up for lost time and sloth.

So yesterday morning with steely determination we pulled ourselves out of bed in our City apartment at 6:15 am and made our way to 28th Street in Manhattan, or what remains of the wholesale flower district. Our first stop was Fischer & Page, Ltd., a purveyor that always has the best, freshest, most unusual, and most gorgeous selection of cut flowers. We were happy to find Chris, a helpful and fun fellow that usually attends to us, and quickly decided with his input that a recently-arrived load of elegant quince branches would be a far-lovelier choice to decorate our drawing room at Darlington than the magnolia branches we had originally thought. We liked the fact that there’s nothing all that much Christmas-y about quince, and so much less expected than magnolia. We put a “hold” on three bunches, along with a plain balsam wreath for the door of our workhouse, and then headed out to scope out the rest of the street.

Our next stop was at Foliage Garden where, with the help of the ever-pleasant and amusing Jeff, we selected a large flat of paper-whites, two clay pots of white amaryllis, and three pots of muga pines. We then moved on to U.S. Evergreens, Inc., and chose two of their beautiful wreaths: the first, made from southern magnolia leaves, we decided would be perfect for the door of our smaller barn, and the second, made from a medley of evergreens, we thought would be perfect for the door to our kitchen, which is our primary, day-to-day entry to the house. Our final stop was Planter Resource, Inc., where we picked up a carton of votives. With all of this in hand we loaded up the Rover and drove uptown to pick up the rest of our stuff, and Pompey.

The Rover, packed to the gills

It was bit of a challenge fitting everything we needed to in the Rover, but we managed to do it. We arrived at Darlington mid-afternoon, unloaded the truck, and set about beginning the tasks and labors required to make Christmas a reality at Darlington House. 

Stay tuned for pictures of the finished results...

The kitchen with all our bags and boxes

More bags in the kitchen, plus 75 votives

The quince branches, ready for decorating the drawing room

A dozen additional Dietz lanterns to light the drive, plus our little Christmas tree

One bundle of the 175 yards of white pine roping

The balsam wreath for the workhouse door

Three muga pines, for the entry table

Paper whites for the flower-arranging room

Our collection of ornaments, organized by color, ready to hang on the tree...

Photos by Boy Fenwick and Reggie Darling

Boy Makes a Wreath

Boy and I have been tardy decorating Darlington for Christmas this year. I think we have a lot of company in this, though, given what I’ve heard from others and have also been reading on the blogs. It seems that Christmas occurring on a Friday this year has upset many a timetable, and we are not alone in finding it to be somewhat challenging to crank up the Christmas spirit this season.

Last year's garland and wreaths

But we’d better get moving, and but fast. While Christmas is only a couple of days away we’re having 75 for cocktails just a few days later and the house needs to be decorated for the party. It won’t be the end of the world if we aren’t done decorating by Christmas day, but it will be a calamity if we’re not fully decorated a few days later when the throng shows up expecting a show.

With this in mind we forced ourselves this past Saturday to get out the door and find a tree. We went to a nearby “you cut ’em” Christmas tree farm and found an acceptable option, currently sitting in our barn where we stowed it when we got home. We’ll decorate it Christmas Eve. Although there were numerous options available to find a tree on Saturday, getting our hands on roping and wreaths was another matter. Our usual sources were not only picked over, but mostly picked clean. The early-birds got there first. We bought the last bundle of plain-as-Jane white pine roping that our local florist had, in sad contrast to the long-gone boxwood roping we usually get. We found some more white pine roping at our local supermarket, of all places, so I think we’re ok in that department, particularly if we double it up to make thicker garlands. However, the only wreaths we found were desiccated, smashed, and showering needles, so no luck there.

We usually put up half a dozen or so wreaths at Darlington – one on the smaller of our two barns, another on our workhouse, and the rest on the house. So when we returned with nary a wreath to hang we thought it was a pathetic situation, indeed. Although we’re planning on going to the flower district in Manhattan to buy magnolia branches to decorate the drawing room at Darlington for our party, we wondered would we have to buy our wreaths there as well? The thought of doing so seemed extravagant and wasteful -- why not just burn our cash while we’re at it?

Fed up with the whole thing I decided that my time would be better spent working on my blog for the rest of the afternoon. But Boy came up with a brilliant idea. He would make a wreath for the front door at Darlington, so we would at least have something on our house to alert passers by that its inhabitants were not so slothful that they couldn’t at least bring themselves to find a single wreath. So off he went to one of our barns and set to work.

Boy shows how it's done

Within an hour he came back to the house with a lovely, beautifully-made wreath of the freshest greens imaginable, and hung it on our front door. All it took was the following: a wreath form (we have a handful left over from prior years), floral wire, assorted greens, and a healthy dose of flair and style – which Boy has in abundance. And he didn’t have to leave Darlington to find any of the components. We already had the necessary supplies and the greens – a combination of Eastern white pine (Pinus strobus) and Western red cedar/Arborvitae (Thuja plicata) – were growing right there on our property.

The finished product

(Ignore door color, it's the undercoat)

So lessons learned here include:

• The early bird does, in fact, get the worm;
• You don't have to buy your wreaths, you can make them easily enough if you have the tools and sufficient ingenuity; and
• The prospect of making 5 more wreaths is sufficiently daunting that we probably will end up buying the rest of them at the flower district after all...

Photos by Boy Fenwick and Reggie Darling

Guest-Posting on Emily Evans Eerdmans

Please visit and read my guest-posting on the inestimable Emily Evans Eerdmans' blog.  I am tickled pink and highly flattered to be included in such august company!

http://emilyevanseerdmans.blogspot.com/