74 
House Garden 
PAGES from a 
DECORATOR’S DIARY 
RUBY ROSS GOODNOW 
H OW charming it would be to receive hundreds 
of gay packages at Christmas, packages 
labeled “Not To Be Opened At All,” instead of 
“Not To Be Opened Before Christmas.” If you 
love decoration for its own sake, you will have a 
greater thrill at receiving a gay and spectacular 
package than at opening it and finding some what- 
on-earth-shall-I-do-with-this present. None of us 
is really greedy for gifts at Christmas, but all of us 
hunger for Surprise, and Festival, and Remem¬ 
brance. Christmas cards get more and more per¬ 
sonal, more and more interesting, but they do not 
satisfy the eye as does a pile of vari-colored, tinseled 
packages. 
Most of us adore Christmas, and thrill at the 
mysterious packages and the gay envelopes that 
pile up for our delight, but we dread and deplore 
the obligation of giving. We would like to give 
spontaneously, or not at all, but we find ourselves 
victims of habit, of sentiment, and we go on bestow¬ 
ing and receiving meaningless gifts. I certainly do 
not purpose to advise against giving or receiving, 
because the Christmas thrill is too precious an 
experience to forego. 
Once I wanted to give a Christmas present to a 
man who had everything, and I at last found a book 
of a translation of Chinese verses which I hoped he 
hadn’t seen, and tied it up with silver paper and 
silver cord. Where the cords made a bow I tied a 
dozen or more silver baubles, of many sizes, a 
glittering bouquet of bubbles larger than the book 
itself. Months later that man told me he had 
never opened the package. It had so beguiled 
him that he had kept it unopened. What more 
could one ask of a gift than to have it give con¬ 
tinued interest and delight? 
T HERE are so manj r fascinating papers and 
ribbons and tinsels, so many boxes of so many 
contours—why not vary the Christmas tree idea 
and make a quantity of these charming things to 
hang on it, to pile under it? 
We can give ch'ldren things that will delight 
them, but it is a privilege to give things to a grown¬ 
up. We can’t possibly know many people well 
enough to know exactly what they want. When 
we do, it is a joy to give it. I know that Rosy 
Playfair collects old ribbons, and when I find a 
length of ribbon embroidered with portraits and 
motifs commemorating Queen Victoria’s marriage, 
I am giving myself a thrill in giving that bit of old 
ribbon to Rosy. But I don’t know whether Mary 
Manners would really appreciate a Battersea 
enamel box, and the gift has as much right to 
appreciation as the person who receives it has to 
surprise and pleasure. I'd rather give my bit 
of Battersea to someone who will adore it, although 
I know her very slightly, than to some old friend 
who will not love it enough. But why shouldn’t 
I give Mary Manners, whom I like, a thrill by 
sending her a mysterious glittering box of nothing- 
at-all? 
C HRISTMAS trees are like Christmas stockings 
and Christmas turkeys, where children are 
concerned. To deviate from the custom is to dis¬ 
appoint their exact wishes. Children are not inter¬ 
ested in clever ideas, in amusing variations of rare 
customs. They prefer their Christmas trees and 
stockings and turkeys just so. They are jealous 
of any changed word in their pet fairy stories, and 
they want their same ornaments hung on the 
Christmas tree year after year. 
But grown-ups welcome a change. The con¬ 
ventional tree is not a bore, but it is a sadness, if 
there are no children. And yet the habit of our 
hearts says there must be a tree. 
The idea for the prettiest Christmas tree I ever 
had came from a Charles II tree of silver gilt 
threads. I suppose it was just a tree, not a Christ¬ 
mas tree, and I haven’t any idea why such a lovely 
playful thing was done, in that long ago time. 
But having seen it, we had an idea. We bought 
one of those funny little German trees made of 
wires folded against a wooden stem, painted a 
poisonous green, and having spread the branches 
covered them with silver foil. When the little tree 
was all silver, we twisted the branches, and tied 
strange tinsel flowers—all shades of metallic cerise, 
and absinthe, and lemon, and emerald. It was a 
delicate and lovely thing, and now that it has 
grown very shabby, it has something of the quality 
of the old silver-gilt Charles II one. We always 
bring it out and sit it on the piano at Christmas 
time, although it is too shabby to sit on the dinner 
table, where this year the exquisite mondaine in 
her sleigh and her swan will command our appetites. 
Y ESTERDAY I had luncheon with an old lady, 
the most beautiful creature you can imagine. 
She wore the stiffest, heaviest, black silk dress, 
Quakerish of cut, with a precise row of rhinestone 
buttons down the front, and a regal lace fichu 
crossing precisely over her bosom. She had a most 
extraordinary way of dressing her hair, copied 
exactly from an old Greek statue. Dozens of neat 
little white curls carefully disposed upon dozens 
more covered her whole beautiful head, suggesting 
days of labor of faithful handmaidens. And I 
thought, what a beautiful thing is order! Nothing 
is so satisfying to the eye as repetition of agree¬ 
able forms. The Greeks realized this. They re¬ 
peated the same simplicities over and over, until 
they ceased to be simplicities. The disposal of 
ornament on their vases, the regular arrangement 
of their colonnades, all these orderly repetitions of 
beautiful units make the serenity that charms us. 
Order is to the decorator what rhythm is to the 
musician, and metre to the poet. Symmetry is like 
rhyme added to metre. A repetition of form is 
satisfying to a wistfulness within us, as a childlike 
eagerness for sureness. 
I have always had a strong sense of affection for 
the English gardener who locked his own lad in one 
summerhouse because the master’s son was locked 
in the twin summerhouse across the garden. 
Nothing is more discouraging to the woman of 
the Elephant’s Child genus—The Tidy Pachyderm 
—than the caller who comes into a calm room and 
throws his belongings everywhere, a hat on the 
piano, a coat on a lovely small chair, gloves on the 
tea table, newspapers on the sofa—something on 
everything! A cyclone could be no more devastat¬ 
ing to the tranquil mood of the room. 
D ISORDER is more unpleasing to me than 
dust. Indeed, an arranged room only reveals 
its dust to its housekeeper. A clutter of clean things 
is more unpleasing than an orderly arrangement of 
dusty things. I do not enjoy the “pizen-neat” 
rooms of New England, where if you pick up a 
book, someone straightens it when you put it down, 
but I do believe that a fundamental sense of order¬ 
liness makes any room agreeable. 
I was once called to Washington to see the draw¬ 
ing room in the house of a great lady. It was a 
chaos of furniture. You couldn’t walk without a 
definite steering of your feet among the crowded 
chairs and sofas. I was asked to eliminate as many 
things as necessary, but by a complete rearrange¬ 
ment it was not necessary to eliminate anything. 
The chairs and sofas were arranged in precise 
groups, and gradually the room became clarified. 
When the master of the house came in he was 
extremely puzzled, because he missed nothing, and 
yet the whole feeling of the room was changed. 
T HE world is not only very full of a number 
of things, but there are always so many new 
uses for old things, and old ways of doing new 
things, that the Decorator’s daily gossip is enchant¬ 
ing. One sees and hears, constantly, such things as 
that... Mrs. Leland Ross, who has a beautiful 
English-park sort of place called Parland House, 
near Madison, New Jersey, has a painted silk 
dressing table inspired by a crumbling old Louis 
Seize gown. The gown was pale yellow-pink, em¬ 
broidered with sprays of wheat in many pale greens, 
and further embellished with rufflings of thread 
lace over yellow-green silk ribbons. The dressing 
table is draped like the original petticoat, but the 
sprays of wheat are painted. The top of the table, 
which is covered with glass, is copied from the 
elaborate front panel of the old gown . .. Mr. Mor¬ 
gan Goetchius, in his fresh and charming farmhouse 
at Smithtown, L. I., has found a way of making 
reproduction English sporting prints look like old 
ones. He uses an amber colored glass, instead of 
an ordinary one, and you’d swear the mellow look¬ 
ing color print beneath was as old as the real ones 
in the same room . . Mrs. Samuel Barlow bought 
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