About Emily

Who Emily is

Emily Hart grew up in a small town in upstate New York, in a house where Christmas started the weekend after Thanksgiving and her mother and her grandmother Ruth decorated together. At eighteen she moved to New York City to study studio art.

From 2011 to 2017 she worked as a visual merchandiser for a home-décor store in Manhattan, dressing the windows and building the holiday displays every fall. That is where she learned how light, height, color and repetition make a display look full on a small budget, and how fast a room looks cheap when everything matches.

In 2017 she started her own small seasonal business. Every November and December since, she has decorated apartments, row houses, shop windows and small restaurants around the city: trees, mantels, stoops, windows and holiday tables. Many of her clients are past sixty, and this book was written with them in mind.

She keeps her late grandmother Ruth's box of old glass ornaments and hangs them first every year. She puts up her own tree the weekend after Thanksgiving and takes it down after New Year's Day. In 2025 she started her channel to share what she has learned in other people's living rooms.

Work

Holiday decorator with her own small seasonal business in New York City, since 2017

Before that

Visual merchandiser for a home-décor store in Manhattan, 2011–2017

Seasons

Fifteen holiday seasons of windows, trees and other people's living rooms

Grew up

A small town in upstate New York

Where it started

Her mother and her grandmother Ruth, decorating the house together every Christmas

What she is, and isn't

Emily is a holiday decorator. She is not a licensed interior designer, an electrician or a fire-safety expert, and the book never pretends otherwise. She never names her clients or tells their stories in a way anyone could recognize.

How the book is put together

• Decisions, not shopping. The book is built on seven rules and ten color schemes. Every room chapter puts them to work at three levels: twenty minutes, a weekend, or the full magazine look.
• Checked facts. The safety facts come from the National Fire Protection Association, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and the ASPCA, checked in October 2026. Every fact about a tradition or an old ornament comes from more than one source.
• Price ranges, not promises. Stores change their prices and sale dates every year, so the book gives ranges and patterns, and says when they were checked. It never tells you which store is better.
• Illustrations, labeled. The room pictures are illustrations made with an AI image generator to show the ideas. Each one is labeled as an illustration; none of them is a photograph of a real home.
• Not professional advice. Nothing in the book is medical, electrical, legal or financial advice. Follow the instructions on every product you buy.