Hush and Holly

Our story

Hush and Holly is a family. Not a brand name someone bought, not a warehouse with a logo on it — the four of us, a kitchen table that stops being a kitchen table around the middle of October, and more wire and spruce than any reasonable household should own.

It started two years ago, and it started by accident.

The first one wasn't for sale

We made the first wreath for our own front door, because we couldn't find one we actually liked. Everything in the shops was thin. You'd hang it up, and by the second season the greenery had gone flat and the bow had given up. The ones that weren't thin cost more than the tree.

So we made one. It took a whole evening and most of a second, and when it went up on the door it looked like something. Neighbours said so. Then they asked where it came from, and we said we'd made it, and they asked if we'd make one for them.

That first winter we made eleven. The next year, rather more. This year we decided to stop pretending it was a hobby.

Why the Nativity

We wanted a wreath that still meant something. So we put the Nativity back at the centre of it.

Somewhere along the way Christmas decoration stopped saying anything. It got shinier and emptier at the same time. Our first wreath had the Holy Family at the centre because that is what Christmas is in our house, and we were surprised how many people said the same thing when they saw it: I've been looking for one like this for years.

The Mitten wreath came later, and from a much sillier place — an argument about the drawer of odd gloves in the hallway that nobody will throw away. It turns out most families have that drawer.

How we work

We build in small batches, to a number we can finish properly rather than a number a forecast tells us to hit. Every wreath is arranged by hand: the centrepiece set first, then the greenery layered outward, then the lights threaded down into the branches so what you see after dark is the glow and not the wire. The bow is tied last, and it's tied by a person, which is why no two sit exactly the same.

We answer our own email. If you write to us, one of us reads it — usually the same day, occasionally at an hour that suggests we should have gone to bed.

What we're actually hoping for

That you hang it, and it looks like something. That somebody walking past slows down. That in January you put it back in its box instead of the bin, and next December you go looking for it.

That's the whole business, really.

— [Add your name and your family's names here]
Hush and Holly