Decorating your home for Christmas is just another way of sharing your holiday spirit, and with fresh flowers readily available, you don’t have to rely on silk or artificial arrangements.

There are all sorts of beautiful holiday table centerpieces you can cerate.

Don’t think that you must stick to the more traditional Christmas flowers such as poinsettias. Any pretty red and white flowers will do quite nicely for Christmas flower arrangements.

There are many types of greenery, too. Holly and mistletoe are always nice, but you can use fragrant evergreen boughs, spiky pine cones, ivy, or almost any greenery in your arrangements.

Carnations make lovely holiday bouquets and centerpieces!

Besides being readily available, carnations are inexpensive, as well. With big, ruffled, frilly blooms, a centerpiece of red and white carnations with greenery accents is a charming addition to your Christmas dinner table.

You may also use beautiful red and white tulips for Christmas flowers. There are bicolored “candy cane” varieties that are striped red and white—so festive for the holidays!

Dramatic red roses with greenery and delicate white baby’s breath combine for an elegant, yet cheerful, centerpiece for your table.

A particularly showy Christmas table floral centerpiece may be created using fresh potted poinsettias and shiny Christmas ornaments inside a large basket decorated with a Christmas ribbon bow on the handle.

The possibilities for Christmas flowers to be used in table centerpieces are numerous!

Use your imagination and let your creative juices flow to come up with some winning ideas for your holiday décor!

For instance, a large blooming Christmas cactus would make a stunning table centerpiece!

Many hostesses like to arrange Christmas flowers with candles for a bit of holiday ambience. Floating candles, for example, along with floating poinsettias or other fresh Christmas flowers makes a stunning and extremely stylish floral centerpiece for a holiday table.

You might also arrange shiny, brightly colored ornaments in a big, clear vase holding a tall Amaryllis or orchid!

Paperwhite Narcissus make gorgeous Christmas flowers, especially when combined with red flowers such as tulips, carnations or cyclamen.

Regardless of which Christmas flowers you decide to use for your holiday table centerpiece, the addition of fresh flowers will add a big helping of charm and holiday cheer!

You can count on having beautiful flowers on your Christmas cactus in time for the holidays year after year, and they make wonderful, long lasting gifts.

In fact, if properly cared for, a Christmas cactus can live and bloom for hundreds of years! How’s that for a gift that keeps on giving?

The Christmas cactus is not, as the name would suggest, from the desert. These cactus originate high in the mountains of Brazil, and they are actually forest plants.

You would typically think of a cactus as a plant that doesn’t like moisture, but this not the case at all with the Christmas cactus. It needs to be kept consistently moist for the best growth and blooming.

A Christmas cactus might even drop its flowers or flower buds if the soil becomes too dry.

Due to being called a cactus, one might also think that this flowering plant would thrive on heat. Not so. Your Christmas cactus should be kept away from sources of high heat such as fireplaces, heating ducts and heaters.

A Christmas cactus is extremely easy to care for. It does appreciate some fertilizer during its active growing period. Any fertilizer suitable for blooming houseplants will suffice.

Keep your Christmas cactus in a sunny location! While it can be kept alive in low light locations, it needs a lot of light to realize its full potential and produce abundant growth and beautiful blooms.

You can move your plants outside during warm weather, but don’t set them in direct sunlight or allow the soil to become too dry.

If your Christmas cactus has started to dry out rapidly and/or wilt quite frequently, this is a sign that it needs to be repotted into a larger container.

You should use a potting soil made especially for succulents, or you can make your own potting soil by mixing two parts plain commercial potting soil with one part clean sand or vermiculite.

Your Christmas cactus should be pruned after blooming for best results. Simply take off a few sections of each stem by pinching at the joint. Alternatively, you can prune by using a sharp knife to remove the sections.

Christmas cactus will root very easily, and you can use the pruned cuttings to propagate new plants just by rooting them in moist vermiculite.

To force your Christmas cactus into bloom for holiday flowers, it should be kept in a dark place for 12 hours every night. You should begin this process around the middle of October to ensure blooms by Christmas.

It usually takes around 6-8 weeks to see flower buds beginning to form at the tips of the stems, after you start the forcing process.

Christmas cactus come in a variety of gorgeous colors, and make beautiful, festive Christmas flowers!

You can always use silk flowers instead of fresh, but if you have access to fresh flowers, these are preferable.

First of all, decide where you want to use your Christmas flower arrangement. For instance, if you want to place one on a hall table, it could be tall. On the other hand, if you want to use it on your dinner table, you would probably want a relatively short arrangement so that people could see over it.

Where and how you intend to use your arrangement will determine the size.

Let’s say that you want a beautiful arrangement of Christmas flowers on a table in your entrance hall, so that holiday visitors will see it as soon as they come into your home.

For this location, there are several possible flowers and plants that would work quite well in creating a charming arrangement.

You might begin with a large poinsettia in traditional red, or choose one of the new shades of white or even pink.

Place the potted poinsettia, pot and all, into a large rustic type basket that is large enough to hold the poinsettia and other flowers. Line the basket with heavy plastic first, and then place a round clay flower pot drainage bottom of the kind that sits under a regular clay pot. You will need the plastic and the clay flower pot bottom to prevent water from seeping out onto your table when you water the fresh poinsettia.

Make sure that the basket you choose is large enough to hold other flowers that will be around the poinsettia.

Next, add sphagnum moss all around the pot, surrounding the poinsettia, and moisten it well.

Then, start adding some fresh greenery such as ivy or holly branches with berries, sticking the ends down into the moist sphagnum moss, all around the poinsettia.

Use whatever greenery you have at hand or can pick up at the local nursery. If you don’t have holly or ivy, you can use small branches of almost any sort of evergreen bush or tree.

At this point, if you want to; you can add some small Christmas ornaments such as bells, balls or whatever, among the greenery surrounding the poinsettia.

If the basket has a handle, wrap some festive Christmas ribbon around it and tie a big bow on top or at one side.

If you have access to other fresh flowers, you can insert the stems into the moist sphagnum moss, and the entire arrangement will stay fresh and pretty for quite some time. Just be sure to keep the moss moist at all times.

If you don’t want to use a rustic basket and want a more sophisticated look, you can use a big crystal or cut glass bowl or almost any container that is large enough to hold the potted poinsettia in the center.

Christmas flower arrangements say “Happy Holidays” to all!

These beautiful flowers, native to South America, are of the genus Hippeastrum, and grow from a large bulb. Each plant can grow to a height of up to approximately 3 feet, with huge, lavish, tropical-look trumpet shaped blooms.

Red, white, and variations of those colors are the favorite for Christmas flowers, but Amaryllis bulbs are available in a very wide range of gorgeous colors and bi-colors.

Amaryllis are extremely easy and rewarding to grow because they always produce such magnificent results!

If you want to have Amaryllis blooming indoors for the Christmas holidays, you should start watering the bulbs around 8 weeks beforehand.

When you purchase a pre-potted Amaryllis, it will usually come with a pot without holes, a pot with drainage holes, potting soil mix, and the bulb itself.

If you buy the bulb by itself, without a planting pot, then choose a pot that has a diameter of about 2” wider than the bulb at its thickest part.

When you pot the bulb, do not cover it completely! You want to leave about half or one third of the bulb out of the potting mix. Supposedly, you should make sure that you plant the bulb right side up, but experts disagree on whether this makes a difference or not.

Don’t over water an Amaryllis bulb, or it may rot, but do keep the soil moist at all times during its active growing period.

Don’t fertilize your Amaryllis until new green leaves appear.

Keep the Amaryllis in a room temperature of approximately 65-70 degrees while it is actively growing.

The Amaryllis bulbs or bulbs with potting kits usually found at garden centers and retail stores are pre-programmed to bloom in about 8 weeks after they are potted and watering has begun.

However, unlike some bulbs, Amaryllis do not require a period of dormancy and you can keep your plant growing year round if desired.

It can be forced into bloom at almost any time provided that it has had a long enough growing period (normally 6-7 months) and put into dormancy by either storing it in a cool 40-45 degree room or withholding water.

If you live in a warm enough climate zone, you can plant and grow Amaryllis bulbs outside with great success!

You can keep your Amaryllis bulbs and force Christmas blooms from year to year. An Amaryllis bulb can live and bloom for up to 75 years!

Wowza!

That is a fantastic return on a very minimal investment, as Amaryllis can usually be purchased for between $5-$10.

Pots of gorgeous blooming Amaryllis make perfect Christmas flowers, and will lend grace, elegance and beauty to your holiday home!