6 Fun Car-Themed Ideas for Decorating Your Christmas Tree
Christmas is a special time of year that’s brought to life when you embellish your home with festive decorations. The lights, wreaths, and tree all make the house radiate with cheer. And like a snowflake, every Christmas tree is different, decorated with a collection of ornaments that are unique to each family.
Themed Christmas trees are all the rage these days. In fact, my wife and I have tree that’s only decorated with snowflakes of varying shape, material, and color. Yet each ornament still holds a special meaning to us.
If you love cars and want to show off your personality by decorating your Christmas tree with a theme, here are some ways to deck the halls with horsepower.
Themed Christmas Tree Ornaments for Car-Lovers
Road Trip: Fill your tree with ornaments from places you’ve traveled on road trips, specifically ones that resemble landmarks and buildings. Add in some iconic road signs like Route 66 and state welcome signs, plus yellow streamers as a median. Include an ornament of you and your family in the car together, too (one with a photo printed on it). Make sure you write dates on each of your ornaments to remember when you traveled!
Vintage: If you’re a classic car enthusiast, you appreciate the beauty of yesteryear’s automobiles. Because Christmas is a time for remembering the past, fill your tree’s branches with ornaments of classic cars. You can purchase pre-designed ones from a holiday store, or gather scale toy cars like Hot Wheels and make your own (with some hooks and glue).
Racing: Die-hard race fans–whether stock car, Indy, or Formula 1–love showing their support of certain drivers and teams. Collect ornaments of your favorite team’s cars, drivers, helmets, and other branded items. Sprinkle in miniature checkered flags and top the tree with a trophy instead of a star. If you normally have a train around the base of the tree, replace it with a race track.
Construction: If you or your kids are excited by big trucks and heavy machinery, make your Christmas tree resemble a construction zone. Fill it with miniature orange safety cones, orange vests (which you can sew out of orange fabric), yellow-and-black streamers, and ornaments of construction vehicles. Tiny caution and stop signs will also add to the theme, as will replacing your tree’s star with a plastic orange cone.
Car Parts: The insides of cars can be just as interesting as the outside. Turn a car inside out by decorating your tree with various car parts, either real–like keys, a spark plug, joints, filters, washers, and buttons–or fake, with ornaments resembling engines, tires, and fenders. Give your tree a “grungy garage” look with the addition of tools and oil splatters (black paint).
Branding: For those who love cars in general but cant’ decide on a favorite brand, why not celebrate them all? Give your tree some glitz by collecting brand badges and hood ornaments, which you can collect at scrap yards or online marketplaces. Get a big Mercedes-Benz star to put on top!
Aaron is unashamed to be a native Clevelander and the proud driver of a Hyundai Veloster Turbo (which recently replaced his 1995 Saturn SC-2). He gleefully utilizes his background in theater, literature, and communication to dramatically recite his own articles to nearby youth. Mr. Widmar happily resides in Dayton, Ohio with his magnificent wife, Vicki, but is often on the road with her exploring new destinations. Aaron has high aspirations for his writing career but often gets distracted pondering the profound nature of the human condition and forgets what he was writing… See more articles by Aaron.