How to: Create a pretty holiday porch

4 How to decorate a Christmas wreath
For a luxe holiday porch look, add festive red berries to a store-made fresh wreath. Intersperse it with sprigs of holly or branches of ilex berries, both inexpensive and readily available this time of year. Trim ilex branches and poke into the wreath’s wire frame. For shorter holly sprigs, use twist ties or florist wire to secure it in the back.

5 How to make a bough
For a less formal look, consider a bough instead of a wreath. Cedar branches, with their strong fragrance and soft greenery, are popping up in all the decor magazines this winter. Buy at least three healthy looking branches and tie stems together using florist wire (a twist tie will do in a pinch). Use a few feet of thick satin ribbon that coordinates with your outdoor lights (if you’re using them) and tie a fat bow over the florist wire.

6 How to hang a bough or wreath
Much like a painting, a wreath or bough should hang approximately at eye level. Rule of thumb: Hang it so the centre sits one-third of the way down the door. One pretty solution for suspending it if you don’t own a wreath hanger is to string it on a length of ribbon and push a flat tack into ribbon at the top of the door.

7 How to decorate a holiday urn
A black cast-iron urn brimming with evergreens, branches of berries and ornaments is the ultimate front porch decoration. The key here is abundance and height. Drape lots of cedar branches to make a bottom layer inside the urn, fill with boxwood branches, skewer pine cones into it with florist wire and add tall berry branches in the middle for height. Generally, the tall branches should be at least the length of the urn itself for a balanced look. For colour, nestle Christmas tree ball ornaments or fruit such as pomegranates and oranges into the greenery.

8 How to decorate planters for the holidays
I have black zinc planters on my porch that do nothing but collect snow in the winter. This season, I’ll press them into use by laying boxwood branches in them and dotting with lots of Ikea’s sparkling silver Kotte ornaments.