Large Christmas Wall Art

Large Christmas Wall Art

Most people buying a large Christmas piece are decorating an occasion rather than a house. There is a wall everyone will stand in front of for a few weeks — a hallway, the end of a dining room, the space behind the tree — and the aim is for it to look deliberate instead of tinselled by accident. That is a different job from a year-round print and it changes what is worth buying.

Subjects that survive a second and third December are usually the quiet ones: winter landscapes, bare trees under snow, a lit window in the dark, deep greens and dull golds. Anything carrying a year, a cartoon face or a joke is a one-season purchase. Snow scenes have the useful property of being merely wintry rather than explicitly festive, so they can stay up into late January without looking like an oversight.

Scale should account for how busy the room already is. By mid-December there is a tree, garlands, cards on strings and lights on timers, all competing. One large calm image holds that together far better than a scatter of small ones, which simply adds to the clutter it was meant to answer.

Storage is the unglamorous half of the decision. A seasonal piece spends most of its life off the wall, so decide now where it goes for the other eleven months: flat under a bed or on top of a wardrobe, face-in against a wall, away from radiators and away from lofts that swing between damp and hot. That thought alone often argues for one big piece rather than three medium ones.

Put the fixing in now, while you can see what you are doing. Leave a small hook in the wall permanently, painted over if it bothers you, and mark the height on the back of the piece. Rehanging in the dark of a December evening with a drill and a house full of people is how a wall ends up with three holes and a crooked picture.