During a mid-August appearance on the Bravo-centric podcast Bitch Sesh, Lauren Lapkus shared a detail about her life that changed mine. The actress-comedian was describing her admiration of the exquisite tree displayed by Real Housewives of New York star Jenna Lyons last Christmas, and she mentioned a remarkable holiday tradition of her own. Each fall, Lapkus puts up an orange plastic “Christmas” tree with built-in white lights and decks it out with Halloween-themed ornaments.
As someone for whom the holidays can’t start early enough, I was inspired. Why should indoor decorative trees be confined to the Christmas season? Three weeks later, a seven-foot orange tree was bewildering my two young sons in our Brooklyn apartment and I was calling Lapkus to learn more about her festive autumn philosophy.
“It was definitely a pandemic purchase,” Lapkus says of her tree, which she bought on Amazon from a brand called Treetopia. “It was September 2020, and I just needed to feel joy.” She had been admiring colorful trees online and felt moved by the orange. “You have to kind of manufacture holidays in L.A., because the temperature doesn’t drop until January, and the seasons don’t change that much. Then I searched #HalloweenTree and got extremely excited. There’s a whole world of options. A niche population of this country is really into this, but it’s not talked about.”
Over the past three years, Halloween has become almost as big a holiday in Lapkus’s house as Christmas. She puts hers up in mid-September, a time she feels is suitable to avoid drawing the ire of the it’s-too-early-for-holiday-season set. “I lean toward cute Halloween versus spooky,” she says. “I have some sweet vintage-inspired ornaments from artist Johanna Parker; I get a lot on Etsy. I have some Mickey Mouse ghosts that I love.” Her favorite element is a skirt that resembles the ghost dog Zero from The Nightmare Before Christmas, but the décor is ever-changing: “Part of the fun is being on the hunt for something every year. I put up black garland, and you can do a lot with purple and green.”
The tree’s location in her home changes, but she likes it in a high-traffic room where she settles in to watch scary movies, preferably with a window to spread Halloween cheer: “It’s all about the lights at night and feeling that glow. Friends love the tree. It’s unexpected and brings so much warmth.” After a few weeks with a seven-foot orange tree of my very own, I couldn’t agree more. I weirdly look forward to coming home to sit by it. We’ve decorated it with gold ornaments for now (with plans to go more Halloween themed a little later in October), so it has a fireplace effect.
Another benefit of the tree is that it makes “a great background for photos of kids in costumes,” according to Lapkus. She also has started to contemplate the opportunities that exist elsewhere on the calendar: “A white tree could be interesting across multiple seasons. I bought my brother’s family a blue tree for Hanukkah. I’ve thought about a Valentine’s tree too. You could do a lot with that. I may end up just having trees up all year.” I’m taking notes.
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