Treetime inspires holiday traditions

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

"We would like Treetime to become people's yearly Christmas destination. We want to be everything Christmas for them," Laurie Kane said. "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."

The store, 22102 N. Pepper Road in Lake Barrington, also offers decorating hints and supplies Christmas lovers with high-quality holiday decor. It's a place to be inspired by looking at fun, interesting and groundbreaking displays, or by taking one of its decorating classes. Treetime 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 is open each year from Labor Day through the second or third week of January. It sells trees through its website, as well as through the store.

While decorating trends come and go, at the core of every year's celebration are the trees and they are what sets 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 worked 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 that everything is as they wanted 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."

So, they 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, which shows just a hint of white, to the heavier applications of white. Kane said the flocking has been vastly improved so that 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 mantel," 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 mantle."

Doorways, particularly exterior doorways, are also often festooned with pine garlands and wreaths. New bendable velvet glitter bows that light up (if you have a handy place to plug them in) are also becoming increasingly popular as accents on these greens.

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