How to Turn Your Yard into a Winter Wonderland

Watch more How to Enjoy Winter videos: howcast.com/videos/410950-How-to-Turn-Your-Yard…

Winter drags on cold, bleak, and gray ... unless you punch up your house's decor with some color, fun, and seasonal cheer.

Step 1: Create a snow family
Create snowmen complete with hats, carrots and button eyes shaped in an attitude of welcome. Turn them into a choir clustered around one another with painted wooden cards meant to look like sheet music, as if singing to the neighbors.

Step 2: Trim the home in lights
Trim the home in lights. Line the driveway and porch with brightly wrapped over-sized packages, candy canes, and wooden soldiers. Run bright, cheery, wide ribbon over the snow-covered shrubs.

Step 3: Decorate windows
Decorate windows with spray frost effects or bright happy phrases, stickers, or faces. Place candles in each window that shimmer on the snow at night.

Step 4: Transform the yard
Transform the yard into a winter wonderland by erecting an inflatable Santa and animated reindeer with lights. Dramatize the scene with floodlights.

Step 5: Festoon the trees
Festoon the trees, bushes, and hedges with lights. Add berries or pine cones and evergreen wreaths with bright bows on the door or a fence.

Tip
During the spring, add garden plants such as dogwoods, holly, or hemlocks to start building a winter landscape look later that year.

Step 6: Save yard brush to decorate
Save and use yard bushes, tree branches, and ornamental grasses, along with dried heather or cone flowers. They enhance the front of the house during the winter. Vary the colors, shapes, and textures to create interest.

Step 7: Flood the yard
Flood the backyard and make a skating rink for family and friends to enjoy. Pipe in music and invite friends and family over to add to the festive spirit of the season.

Did You Know?
The ancient Mesopotamians held a 12-day festival on the Winter Solstice to honor the god Marduk 's conquest of the monsters of chaos.