Holiday inspiration abounds at Treetime

Treetime Christmas Creations in Lake Barrington has become an annual destination for many Chicago-area Christmas-lovers as they excitedly add to and update their Christmas displays.

The store is a magical, fantasy Christmas showroom that changes each year in an effort to keep people coming back to see what decorators have done differently, said the seasonal business's owners, Laurie and Joe Kane.

Open each year from Labor Day through the second or third week of January, Treetime also sells artificial trees through its website, www.treetime.com.

"We shop the world - literally - to bring the latest, unique and most beautiful Christmas items to our customers so we can help them create the magic of Christmas in their own home," Laurie Kane said.

In fact, before this Christmas will even take place, she and one of her buyers will be at Europe's biggest Christmas decor show, shopping for next year. And in January the Kanes take the first of two annual design trips to their tree factories in China.

While decorating trends come and go, at the core of every year's celebration are the trees - and those trees are what set Treetime apart from big-box retailers and other competition, Kane said. All of its trees are custom designed and then hand-assembled, hand-wired and hand-lit.

"We actually travel overseas to the tree factories in late January and work with their designers to create our own trees for the following year, introducing six or seven new trees each year. We are extremely picky because of our engineering backgrounds, so we make these trees the most beautiful we can," she said.

"We bring photos of real live trees and molds of real branches that we want them to copy and they do that right down to replicating spring growth on trees by making them a lighter green at the ends. They will also make flat or pointy needles, dense or sparse. Then we work on the tree's overall branch density and placement and also the color. They are real custom designs," Kane said.

"We work with them all day and then they build samples overnight and we go back and refine them even more. We tell them to make this branch shorter or to make the tree wider at the top," she continued.

The Kanes also give the designers and factory people customer feedback if they have found that a particular tree, garland or wreath is too hard to work with or selling at too high of a price.

Once they have given all of these details, they ask the factory to build the trees, wreaths and garlands in different sizes and then they make a return trip in April to double-check and make sure everything is as they want it to be.

"It seems that every year the decorations in local homes only get more and more elaborate," she said. "Homeowners want to see little touches of Christmas throughout their homes."

People are creating themed trees of all sizes and shapes in many rooms of their house. There are slim trees in the corners, potted trees near the front door and even small potted trees along the banisters on the staircase. Gone are the days when there was only one tree per house, covered with an eclectic mix of ornaments.

Flocked trees now come in many different sizes and types of flocking, from a very cool frost-kissed flocking that shows just a hint of white to the heavier applications of white and, Kane said, the flocking has been vastly improved so it actually stays on the tree and doesn't make a mess of your house.

Mantels, hearths and doorways are other focal points for holiday decorating.

"The pine garland is the heart of every mantle," Kane said, "and most of them are lit. Then we usually weave a soft cascade of ribbon through it and accent the garland with picks of something to coordinate with the rest of the room, like berries or fruit or packages or whatever. We often also put potted trees on the floor on either side of the hearth and a large wreath above the mantel."

Doorways, particularly exterior doorways, are also often festooned with pine garlands and wreaths.

"We would like Treetime to become people's yearly Christmas destination. We want to be everything Christmas for them," she continued. "So we serve coffee, hot chocolate and cookies. We have a big-screen television so the men can watch sports. We are a Toys for Tots donation location, have an annual Breakfast with Santa and even offer pet and child photo shoots with Santa. We want to become a family tradition."

Treetime also offers decorating hints, inspires Christmas-lovers with fun, interesting and groundbreaking displays, and teaches decorating classes. It even has a do-it-yourself room that shows Pinterest-lovers easy ways to make wonderful decorations themselves.

"Our aim is to share our holiday vision with our customers, not just sell them an artificial tree," Kane said.

Treetime Christmas Creations, 22102 N. Pepper Road, can be reached at (847) 527-8880 or by visiting www.treetime.com.