Photos by Jamie Lee
Of all the grand manors and quaint cottages throughout Arkansas dolled up for the holidays, it is hard to imagine anyplace that comes close to the level of holiday spirit displayed by the McFadden home, designed and decorated to the rafters by Paula Jones-McFadden and her obliging husband, Mark.
Everywhere one looks in the casually elegant home, the senses are filled by the trappings of the season. Christmas decor, grouped and arranged by Jones-McFadden herself, comes at the visitor from every angle, each piece hand-placed and adjusted by a discerning eye. Designing, she said, is a knack she has indulged since childhood.
“It’s just a gift God gave me,” she said. “I have always enjoyed decorating, and it’s just become bigger and better the older I got. I just love it. It’s almost like any little spot that’s still left open, I have to decorate it.
Photo by Jamie Lee
“A lot of people decorate for Christmas very minimally, and I like that too. I think it’s beautiful, but with mine, it’s got to be over the top. I guess you could say I’m addicted to it.”
At that, Jones-McFadden let out a squeal of laughter, her mirth bursting forth like the snowmen, Santas and nutcrackers that stand their post in every room of the house. She has always been this enamored with Christmas, even if she did not have the funds to match her grandiose vision starting out.
“I shared a room with my sister growing up, and I would always decorate my little side of the room,” she said. “At Christmastime, my mama just let me do whatever I wanted to do. My older sisters weren’t really big into [decorating], so I would decorate the Christmas tree and decorate the house and just do it all.
“I loved it. It was the most beautiful time of year. My favorite season is probably fall. I love everything about the fall, too, but Christmas was always just a magical time for me.”
Even if the household did not have a lot of money to throw around, she reveled in the familiar traditions of the season, focused on what mattered most.
Photo by Jamie Lee
“It was just such excitement,” she said. “My uncle and his kids would come and visit us most holidays. They lived up in northwest Arkansas, and there would just be tons of kids. It was always a lot of fun and a lot of cooking. My mama always made her cherry cream cheese pie.
“We would also listen to the old Christmas records, you know, Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole. I still love those to this day because it reminds me of my childhood.”
Photo by Jamie Lee
Over time, Jones-McFadden would amass considerably more pieces to her Christmas decor collection, today enough to fill multiple storage crates and occupy two attics and a storage unit during the off-season. Even the decorator herself admitted the collection is a handful.
“I don’t really collect a whole lot of anything. I just gather stuff,” she said. “If I had to guess, probably, I have the most snowflakes and Christmas trees. I put snowflakes up on the windows, and little Christmas trees are just, like, everywhere. We try to count them every year, but I really don’t know how many I’ve actually got. It’s a big number, maybe a hundred of each of those things.”
Photo by Jamie Lee
Santas are another contender for most numerous decor items in the collection. Jones-McFadden said she is pretty sure she is compensating for something in her childhood.
“We were taught that there was no Santa Claus growing up,” she said with another sprinkling of jingle-bell laughter. “That didn’t make sense to me as a kid. There were always presents under the tree, and I knew we didn’t have a lot of money to get presents, so I would be thinking, ‘There’s no way they bought all this stuff. It had to be Santa Claus.’”
Photo by Jamie Lee
Jones-McFadden pointed out that the collection gets culled from time to time, a function inspired less by austerity than space. Even though her unlimited imagination is always at odds with a finite amount of square footage, she cannot help herself when the new decorations come out every year.
“I have no room for anything else, and that’s the honest to God truth, but Walmart’s got some of the best decorations this year. Oh my gosh,” she said. “The last time I was at Christmas at the Warehouse in Des Arc, I was picking ornaments off the Christmas trees because the ones that you’re supposed to purchase were gone.
Photo by Jamie Lee
“I asked one of the people that was working there, I said, ‘I know it says not to take them off the tree, but what am I going to do?’ She said, ‘Well, I’m just going to turn my head and walk away. You just go ahead and pick what you want,” so I was undecorator of those Christmas trees to get my stuff.”
That said, Jones-McFadden’s decorating — which starts right after Thanksgiving every year and can take up to two weeks to complete — is not just a holiday free-for-all but is ruled by a clear vision of what she likes and how the finished project, which changes from year to year, will come together. She described her preferred look as traditional, steering clear of recent trends which have introduced cotton-candy pink and electric turquoise elements into the holiday backdrop. She also stressed balance in all of her groupings in her home.
Photo by Jamie Lee
“When I buy something for my decorations, I have to buy in fours,” she said. “That’s just how it works. My brain works that way. I think two’s got to go here, and two’s got to go over there. Balance.”
Jones-McFadden’s other advice for new decorators is to take some time to decide what one really likes and start there. Practicing decorating in one small area before buying enough to run throughout the home is a good way for beginners to learn, she said. Decorating comes more easily for some people than others, so just keep at it.
“Buy what you like, and do what you want. It’s more about how you place what you have than the decorations themselves,” she said. “You can have great stuff, but if it’s just scattered all over the place, it’s not going to show very well.
Photo by Jamie Lee
“If you see a space, you have to get a good idea of what that’s going to look like before you do anything. I know the stuff that I have, and I usually see the finished arrangement in my head, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have to experiment a little sometimes. If I have to go buy more stuff to put in that space, I go buy more stuff to put in that space. I’m going to keep going until I am absolutely satisfied.”
The single most important thing for beginners to keep in mind, she said, is to decorate for themselves and their families and not necessarily by what social media, the neighbors or anyone else thinks. For example, Jones-McFadden said she is going to incorporate more gingerbread-themed items this year, but it is not because Pinterest or some expert on television told her to.
That helps explain why, despite being regularly encouraged to do so, she has never considered putting her design chops to work for others as a business. Seeing her family’s faces light up at the sight of her work is reward and validation enough.
“My little grandbaby, Corbin, she’s 5 now, and she loves to help me decorate. She’ll even take things and do them herself and redecorate,” she said. “The other little one, she just turned 3, and she likes to do a little bit, and I’m sure she’ll want to do more in the future. Even my youngest son, who’s 21, will ask, ‘Mom, when are you going to start decorating?’ They enjoy it, you know? The guys have even told me it would not be home if there were no decorations.”
