So long, Sad Beige Christmas. Tacky Christmas is coming to town.
Beige Christmas. Disco Christmas. Pink Christmas.
Holiday decorations are not immune to the cycle of online micro-trends that declare a certain color scheme or aesthetic “in.” Fads enjoy their brief moment in the sun before the next -core eclipses them, their baubles destined for a rebrand or the landfill.
The influencer elves have been hammering away at Santa’s workshop to prepare the latest holiday aesthetic du jour: “Tacky Christmas.”
Rather than being another tidy, narrowly defined, monochrome theme, Tacky Christmas is more of a “throw everything you’ve got at the yuletide” sort of vibe. Imagine a tree adorned with a mishmash of ornaments and strings of big-bulbed multicolored lights, finished with a healthy heaping of tinsel, and maybe lay down a train set that circles the base, too.
“It’s not any one specific aesthetic - it’s whatever appeals to you for whatever reason, whether that be nostalgia or just because you think it’s pretty and it makes you happy,” says cozy-content creator Samantha Ulrich-Herman, who is based in Portland, Oregon.
This might seem familiar. That’s because Tacky Christmas is basically just … how Christmas looked back when people might take a photo in front of their tree with a film camera rather than their cellphone, or when “ticktock” referred to the sound of the garland-wrapped grandfather clock instead of a social media app.
While Tacky Christmas may come across as just another micro-trend, in practice, it’s a rejection of the kind of hypercuration that tends to make waves on social media. Rather than creating the illusion of perfection, it embraces a more lived-in, blended bounty. This isn’t the first Noel for these ornaments - and they have the scratches and scuffs to prove it - but there’s so much to look at, you probably won’t notice.
When Ulrich-Herman started seeing the Tacky Christmas trend, “what they were showing was all of the stuff I grew up with and how my parents decorate and how I decorate and I just thought it was hilarious ’cuz I’m like, that’s just Christmas.”
There’s definitely a nostalgia element at play here. When it comes to design and holiday decorations in particular, “I’m kind of always chasing that feeling you have when you’re a kid, that feeling of wonder, you know? And you’re not gonna get that with the Oatmeal Beige Mom Christmas,” says Erika Kikola, who shares photos and tips on Instagram and TikTok from her maximalist home in Pennsylvania.
Not only is she trying to re-create joyful memories of Christmas from her childhood, she wants to build the same for her own young kids. “What makes you feel more warm and fuzzy: seeing color and whimsy and different figures and shapes and everything, or just a neutral Christmas tree?” Kikola says.
The “no rules” approach is freeing for people tired of the ever-lengthening holiday season and its associated pressures, says Molly Kunselman, principal designer at Maryland-based Molly Kunselman Design. She describes Tacky Christmas as a “bit of a rebellion” against trying to make decorations look flawless, either in person or on social media.
Rather than striving for perfection, Kunselman says, “those items aren't putting on airs and so they seem or appear to be more authentic.”
For Kikola, that’s because they are authentic. She sees it as the festive solution for people yearning for more personality in their homes. The ornaments she and her children have made, or the knickknacks she has spent more than a decade thrifting and amassing, are “a reflection of your life,” she says. She loves that she gets to revisit the same decorations each holiday season.
“I open the box and there’s my favorite ornament,” she says. “There’s just so many memories attached to it that you just don’t have when you’re going to big-box stores and buying new things every single year.”
That makes Tacky Christmas, unlike so many of these micro-trends, budget-friendly. You can use whatever you have. But if you are starting from scratch, buying a haul of new products to fill the tree would be missing the point, Kunselman says. Using hand-me-downs and going to thrift stores and places like Facebook Marketplace are better approaches from an aesthetic, economic and environmental perspective.
As for the somewhat derogatory descriptor “tacky,” Kikola doesn’t mind associating herself with it. “When you take things that people wouldn’t necessarily consider matching and you put them together, people can just call it ‘tacky,’” she says. “They don’t really know how to say, ‘It’s whimsical, colorful, vintage Christmas.’ I mean, that’s a lot more words.”
Ulrich-Herman has never tried to follow the latest holiday decorating trends. For her, unwrapping her yuletide items each year is a journey of reminiscence. She revisits the ornaments her mother made during her childhood and the ones she collects with her husband to recall special moments from the year. This season will be no different. But thanks to Tacky Christmas, she will unintentionally be in vogue.
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