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She Kept One Witch Out for Christmas, and for the First Time in Eleven Years Her Mantel Looked Like Christmas and Still Looked Like Her
Estimated 6 minute read
Tess Marlow's living room is the kind you notice from the sidewalk. Dark green walls, a wall of books, three lanterns on the windowsill, a set of antlers over the door, and, from late September onward, a considerable number of witches.
For eleven Decembers she packed all of it into bins on November 1st and put out Santas.
This is the twelfth December. There's a witch on the mantel. I asked her about it.
You take Halloween down on November 1st. What goes in the bins first?
"The easy stuff. Pumpkins, the fake cobwebs, the plastic skeleton my students gave me. That takes an hour and I don't feel anything about it.
"Then I get to the shelf with the witch figurines and the little woodland pieces, the owls, the mushrooms, the lantern with the moth on it, and I just... stall. Every year. I'll go make tea. I'll do the pumpkins again.
"It took me an embarrassingly long time to work out that it wasn't Halloween I didn't want to put away. I don't care about Halloween. It's that those pieces are the only things in the house that feel like me, and for two months a year I put them in a box in the basement."
The pumpkins take an hour. The witches take a week, and not because there are more of them.
And then the Christmas bins come up.
"Right. Santas, snowmen, the red bows, the plaid ribbon. I do the tree, I do the garland, white lights, the whole thing. And I want to be clear, I like it. It's warm. People walk in and go 'oh.'
"But about a week in, I'd be sitting on the couch looking at it, and it looked like a store window. A nice store window. Not a bad one. It just could have been ANYBODY'S living room. Somebody with very good taste in snowmen had decorated a house, and it wasn't me.
"I said that to my sister once and she said, 'Tess, it's Christmas, it's supposed to look like Christmas.' Which, fine. But every other month it's supposed to look like Christmas AND like me, and I'd managed that. December was the one month I'd apparently agreed to disappear."
Her house looked like Christmas. It just didn't look like anyone in particular lived there.
So what were you actually looking for? Not more Halloween, presumably.
"No. God, no. I didn't want a skeleton in a Santa hat. That's a joke, and I didn't want a joke on the mantel.
"I wanted something that was unmistakably Christmas, so nobody walked in and thought I'd forgotten to take October down. But something that kept the part I love, the quiet, slightly mysterious, walk-in-the-woods-in-the-dark feeling. Lanterns. Owls. Pointed hats. Without being spooky, because spooky is October's job.
"Basically I wanted Christmas to come to my house instead of me going to Christmas's house. If that makes sense."
It does.
How did you find her?
"Not looking for her, which is how it always goes. I was buying a wreath online in mid-November and something in a sidebar was wearing a pointed hat, and I thought, oh no, here we go, somebody's stretched Halloween into December, this is going to be awful.
"And then I looked properly.
"It was a witch, yes. Wide curved hat, long hair, an owl on her arm. But her whole gown was an evergreen tree. Pine boughs, layered, with snow on them. Berries. Pinecones. She looked like she'd walked out of the woods behind a Christmas tree farm at dusk. There was nothing Halloween about her at all, and there was also nothing on her that any of my Santas would object to.
"There were three of them. One in sage green with the owl. One in deep burgundy holding a little lantern that actually glows, it's got a warm light in it with a little on-off switch. And one in red and white candy stripes with a candy-cane staff, which I thought was a bit much and then bought anyway, because she's funny.
"They came in a box that said Solstice Sisters, which is the first time a product name has ever made me laugh out loud in a good way."
You put one on the mantel. What happened?
"I put the green one, the one with the owl, right in the middle of the mantel between the garland and the candlesticks. Just to see. Fully expecting to move her.
"And the strangest thing happened, which is that the Santas got better.
"I don't know how else to say it. The snowman on the end had looked like a snowman from a catalog. Now he looked like MY snowman, because there was a witch from the winter woods standing four feet away from him and the whole shelf suddenly had a point of view. It went from 'a Christmas mantel' to 'Tess's Christmas mantel' with one object.
"I stood there for a while. My fifteen-year-old walked through, said 'Oh good, you kept one out,' and kept walking, which from a fifteen-year-old counts as a review."
One figure, and the whole mantel stopped looking like a store window.
Why does she work, though? Halloween witch, Christmas mantel. On paper it shouldn't.
"Because she's not a Halloween witch with a bow stuck on her. Somebody actually THOUGHT about this.
"The parts that are mine, the hat, the owl, the lantern, the long hair, those are all still there, so the mystery's intact. But everything else is Christmas. The gown is a snowy evergreen. There are berries and pinecones and holly. The lantern one glows like a window in a cabin. Nothing about them is eerie. They're warm. They look like they'd offer you cocoa.
"So one figure holds both seasons at once, and you stop feeling like you had to switch yourself off on November 1st and switch a different person on."
"The other thing is they don't look like leftovers. That was my fear, that people would think I'd missed a shelf when I packed up October. Nobody's thought that. My mother-in-law, who owns a Santa in every room of her house, asked where I got 'the tree lady.' She's getting the burgundy one for Christmas and doesn't know it yet."
Twelve Decembers in. Has it changed how you feel about the season?
"I still do all of it. The tree, the string lights, the plaid, the snowman on the end. I love Christmas, I always did.
"There's just a witch from the winter woods on the mantel now, too. Three, actually. I bought the other two the following week.
"And I don't spend a week stalling in front of the Halloween shelf anymore, because I'm not putting myself in the basement for two months. The owls go in the bin. She stays out. She isn't a Halloween decoration I forgot to put away. She's Christmas, just the version that finally feels like me.
"That's the whole thing I'd say to anyone who has a house full of lanterns and antlers and dreads November. You don't have to pack away the things you love because a new holiday showed up. You just need one piece that can stand in both."
For the Reader Who Stalls at the Halloween Shelf
If you've read this far, you already know which shelf in your house this article is about.
Shirem Solstice Sisters Christmas Witch Figurines are the three pieces from Tess's mantel: the Woodland Keeper in sage green with the white owl, the Lantern Keeper in deep burgundy with a lantern that has a warm light and a simple on-off switch, and the Candy Cane Keeper in red and white stripes with her candy-cane staff.
Each is cast in resin, about 18 centimeters tall, which is just under seven inches, with layered pine texture, snow, berries and pinecones, and the long curved hat that makes them what they are.
They're made for mantels and shelves, and they're sold singly, so you can start with one the way Tess did, or take all three.
Tess's advice is to buy the one you'd be embarrassed to love and put her in the middle of the mantel, not the corner. The Santas, she says, will sort themselves out.
Right now they're 50% off, which brings each figurine down to $54.99.
That is less than the plaid ribbon cost her, and the ribbon has never once made a snowman look like hers.
One last thing she said, as I was leaving, looking at the green one with the owl: "Eleven years I put her in the basement. She's not going BACK."
