Decorations light up Xmas celebrations

Maria Endah Hulupi, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Every year, people decorate their homes with beautiful Christmas decorations, among the most popular being the Christmas tree, garlands and gingerbread houses.

For most people, decorating their home to greet Christmas day is a special event that not only adds merriment to the atmosphere but also brings family members closer together.

To ensure novelty, some people look for new ways to decorate their Christmas tree every year, to give it a unique and special appearance.

Though beautiful decorations of different shapes and colors can be purchased in stores, some people create their own special decorations that are not only eye-catching but also please the nose with their sweet scents.

Take, for example, the Christmas trees on display at The Dharmawangsa Hotel in South Jakarta. They were made to bring out sweet and soothing aromas released from a few of the most famous spices, seeds and tropical flowers in the archipelago, such as cinnamon sticks, coffee beans and jasmine. The use of red saga seeds and black kecipir seeds adds an exotic charm to the tree's appearance. For the spices, the seeds and the flowers for the decorative elements, the hotel has them sent in from Yogyakarta.

The idea for the trees was developed by the hotel's head florist, Fransisca A. Soemarso, in cooperation with a member of the hotel's management team, Reny Dahlan.

To make the some three-meter-tall Christmas trees, the hotel's team of florists prepared steel and wire structures, layered them and then covered them with ruscus leaves. The trees were then decorated with rattan balls, filled with coffee beans and tied with cinnamon sticks. The seeds were glued one by one over Ping- Pong-sized balls and rings and were hung on the trees, along with wreaths of jasmine.

For accent, amaryllis flowers, dried hay and rattan balls were put beneath the trees. These sweetly scented trees, along with the hotel's mandatory white flowers, phalaenopsis and jasmine, adorn the Majapahit Lounge, the Bimasena Lobby Lounge and the Jakarta and Sriwijaya restaurants. While round garlands with a similar decorative concept hang on the hotel's walls and pillars.

The Hotel Mulia Senayan in Central Jakarta has come up with festive butterflies and dragonflies, created by designer Sebastian Ee, a consultant for the hotel's flower shop, Blossoms, to decorate its Christmas tree this year.

Hundreds of beautiful white butterflies and dragonflies with glittering gold along their borders were created in different sizes. The designer used branches as the main material for making the tree's structure. These festive insects perch on the tree's surface, which is also decorated with red roses to provide accent.

Besides the delicate insects, designer Ee also created several 60-centimeter-tall reindeer in different poses. He used wire to create the animals' structures and used nothing but dried branches for their slick figures. These wild reindeer have been placed in front of the hotel's shops.

Another example of a classic Christmas decoration is the gingerbread house, and this year the pastry team at the Gran Melia Hotel in South Jakarta has created a three-meter-long and two-meter-high gingerbread house and decorated it with over 100 hard and soft rolls.

Besides two weeks of preparations, the hotel's pastry team required at least 100 kilograms of flour and about 40 kilograms of sugar icing (to assemble the pieces and to give the house a snowy effect) to make this "Aunty Felice gingerbread house" -- the name refers to the head of the pastry team, Felice Manurung.

The house's mouth-watering and eye-catching decorations never fail to attract adult visitors who want to take a picture near the house and children who want to take a bite out of the house.

The same recipe, Felice said, can be used along with small cookie cutters to make Christmas tree, star and man-shaped Christmas tree decorations.