What your holiday decorating palette may say about you

Everyone looks at colour slightly differently, and that seems to go double for holiday colour. 

As a colour forager and part of a growing network of natural dyers, artisans and colour wizards, I know this is worthy of some deep consideration. Now, you may be content to unfold your great-aunt's fancy knitted tablecloth and cover last year's cranberry stains with a sparkly dollar-store pine cone. Even so, I'd argue we're both heavily influenced by the holiday palettes thrown at us.

After all, everyone from Pantone to the candy cane merchandiser at the bulk store is selling you a set of holiday colours. So how to choose one that speaks to you? Maybe the real question is why does the palette you choose speak to you? 

To answer those questions, I went down a rabbit hole of food-based, earth-inspired, chemically made and commercial colour with experts on the subject. 

What qualifies as a holiday colour is a moving target. There are as many different ways of experiencing the holidays and its attendant hues as there are people with childhood memories — or paint chips at the hardware store. And even if your go-to palette is the good 'ol green, red and white, it might be saying more than you realize. (Are you resonating with its Celtic influences or the quantum physics behind it?) Colour, the closer you look at it, reveals itself to be a collaboration between people and particles.

Investigating colour rarely offers singular conclusions, but the experts I spoke with agree on a couple things: that the appeal of holiday colour is multisensory — evoking textures, tastes, smells and sounds — and that, at its heart, embracing a colour palette is about joy (every expert I talked to mentioned the word). And rather than an abstract notion of joy, holiday colour is a tangible, shareable, participatory coming together of mood, meaning and materials.

Red and green

Call it physics or call it primal, it's not surprising that the red and green holiday scheme endures. They're among the first colours we see as babies, and distinguishing these colours was once key to our ancestors' survival — by helping them spot berries among the leaves, for example. 

Many people will tell you traditional Western holiday colours were perfected by Coca-Cola. And it's true that starting in 1931, the company commissioned illustrator Haddon Sundblum to create paintings for a series of ads, which solidified the image of Santa Claus we know today. (Recently, Coke has been under fire for ditching creators and turning to AI.) 

But Sundblum's depiction was based on cartoonist Thomas Nast's images of Santa in Harper's Weekly in the 1860s, which drew from Clement Clarke Moore's descriptions of Santa in an 1822 poem, commonly known as 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, and the red, white and green palette common to Nordic versions of Santa established centuries ago. 

And before all that, there was Father Christmas, St. Nicholas the terrifying Krampus and holly-worshiping Celts, all leaning heavily on green, red and, occasionally, white.

All that to say, if this classic colour combo speaks to you, your nostalgia may have its roots in Yule of centuries, not just decades, past.

RGB

If you aren't a lighting designer or programmer, you might not know that RGB stands for red, green and blue — the primary colours detected by our eyes and blended by our computer screens. But you don't have to study wavelengths to appreciate the energetic, iconic, supersaturated red, green and blue of the holiday lights now tangled in a shoebox deep in your parents' closet.

To delve into this vibrant palette, I reached out to someone who appreciates colour in its most elemental form. Mas Subramanian is a chemist who runs a lab out of Oregon State University and holds 60 U.S. patents. (He's also a fellow of the Neutron Scattering Society of America, which I imagine is pretty hard to get into.) 

In his work, he stumbled upon the shockingly colourful discovery that would make him famous — the first human-made blue pigment since cobalt, around 200 years ago. YInMn Blue, as he and his team called it, is almost electrically blue and exciting enough to inspire a new crayon colour. In the pigment world, Subramanian is kind of a superstar.

He has now set his sights on red, working with moon rocks and more to get closer to the perfect red. I was picturing fire engines, tomatoes and Santa's hat, but Subramanian had something more exact in mind: a solid substance, which is stable, non-toxic and with a wavelength around 700 nanometres. 

"The perfect red will come, just like a perfect blue," he said. "But you have to be very careful when you define a colour like that, because colour is a perception of mind. What I see, the colours, others cannot see the same thing.… When somebody says it's the perfect blue or perfect red — for whom?" And in speaking of the purest of colours, the green of Columbian emeralds, known for its intensity, came to mind. 

If the RGB holiday colour scheme of your youth still holds the most appeal, you might have something in common with those working to produce the most intense colours. It might be a natural favourite of the most scientifically minded among us and for those who appreciate the cheer these colours can bring.

Cool blues

Cool holiday colours might seem counterintuitive, but natural colour specialist Birnur Temel Birtane said she thinks of blue first — and for reasons you might not expect. 

"To me, when you say, like, 'the holidays,' I think of chilly weather," she said. "And it's just associated with blue and carrots." 

Birtane, who wrote A Farmer's Colours: Natural Ink-making and has led colour-foraging and ink-making workshops throughout Turkey, uses local and traditional methods to harvest colours from olive trees, pomegranates — and purple carrots, which produce the colour blue. 

Her focus is on place-based colour, non-toxic inks and creating joy. The kids she works with might use their extracts to paint communally on a white cotton sheet, create artwork on scraps of paper or even make brightly coloured pasta. 

Birtane grew up in Canada and remembers Canadian winters as "kind of brown." Now living and working in Istanbul, after a long, hot orangey summer, the cooling tones of blue feel welcome. White and silver are a natural fit with blues, but she also suggested using nettle leaves in a holiday palette. "If you want hope for the future, you need green." she said. 

If you, too, put these colours together for the bright, cool, wintery feel, perhaps you intuitively appreciate them for how they connect you to a place, your past and hopefully the future.

Earth tones

Earth tones are always muted. Think of the subtle colours of fallen leaves, deep green forests, chalky sky blues, baked-orange canyons and the off-white limestone cliffs of 1970s sunken living room wall hangings. 

The esthetic probably goes back to cave paintings, but whatever era it comes from, earth tones are flat and grounded. And as a holiday palette, they sit opposite to saturated jewel tones and bright, glossy metallics.

"I feel like our world sometimes has a sensory bombardment to it," colour expert Laura Guido-Clark said. "And I feel like the holidays are a time when most of the world is off [work], and they move inward towards their families and they move, like, more towards a time of being with people that they love. And I think that that sense of gathering, you know, is reflected in the sense of … earthiness." 

Guido-Clark is the founder of the consulting firm Love Good Colour and has, for the last 25 years or so, advised companies like Herman Miller and Google on how to use sustainable earth-inspired colour. She describes herself as a colour humanist practised in neuroesthetics, but for all of her training, her thinking on holiday colour is pretty, well, down to earth.

"I've never been a red and green person," she said. "But I feel when you can play with the depths of those colours, when you can play with the paleness of those colours, then you create tension and something super interesting." 

Cranberry red, she said, is a colour that is "filling people's hearts right now." And when combined with vibrant pops of colour, deep greens — which she thinks of as "new neutrals" inspired by nature — "really kind of give you that feeling of joy." 

Unlike the brashness of high-contrast Christmas lights, an earthy holiday scheme has that chestnuts-roasting-over-an-open-fire feeling you might be craving for your holidays. These are comforting colours and maybe especially good medicine for the turning of the year.

Modern metallics

If anyone can forecast holiday trends, it's tastemaker Danielle Suppa. She's a creative director who's collaborated with everyone from Banana Republic to Toronto Metropolitan University and jewelry brands to juice bars. She also owns Souvenir — a sort of affordable art gallery in the west end of Toronto. (Full disclosure: she was also the first person to show my "ink tests" as artworks.)

When we chatted holiday trends, we got into colour palettes right away. "The first thing that jumps to mind is I've been noticing a shift from gold to silver," she said, noting that tinsel is coming back. 

This immediately made me think of the Christmas party from the movie Less Than Zero, but she was talking about a subtler look: chrome paired with creamy, sensual warm tones — maybe a pop of burgundy or chocolate brown. 

We thought of Halston's living room in the 1970s — a time of shearling and disco balls. She used the word "edit" to refer to the art of the mix: it's not just about picking the right thing, but understanding how that right thing layers and contrasts with other right things too, like when you're settling a table. 

"It's creating this sort of layered, joyous idea," Suppa said. "Layering in all these kind of textures and the sparkle and always, always, always candlelight." 

Mingling candles with glitter and retro charm with a modern edge may be just the recipe for an au courant holiday, though it can be tricky to pull off. But if your decor balances both silvery tinsel and warm layers, you may have the instinct to create an environment that's always stylish — and inviting too.