Butler couple adore holiday decor
Marla Emanuele remembers peeking around on a tour of her future house and picturing where she could put different Christmas decorations.
For the past 21 years, she and her husband, Dave Emanuele, have been making her decorating dreams come true by filling almost every room of their early-1900s home on Oak Street with the dozens of pieces collected over the years.
“The minute I saw the house in the summer, I thought, 'This would be a great house for Christmastime,'” Marla said Wednesday. “We have three fireplaces, so we can have everybody's stockings hung.”
Marla said it takes around five days for her to place every stocking, wreath, ornament and bough of holly around their five-bedroom house.
The main floor's living room has an artificial Christmas tree cluttered with ornaments from the couple's three daughters, while the foyer has a smaller live tree with many spherical ornaments.
Across from the foyer is the dining room, Marla's favorite in the house, which has a table set with a red cloth and decorative napkins and plate sets ready for the family's annual Christmas dinner.
The basement kitchen has Christmas statues placed all around, and even the bathrooms are populated by stuffed gingerbread men.While many of the items set out are personal to Marla, she said she is hard-pressed to choose a favorite decoration, or even a favorite room of the house.“Every little thing, I can look at it and I know where I got it or who got it for me,” Marla said. “I get attached to all of it.”
While the interior of the house is adorned with Christmas pieces Marla puts out, the outside decoration is all Dave's handiwork. Marla said at age 68, her husband still scales the structure to place hanging lights along the layers of roof, which worries her, but not him.“If it were that dangerous I wouldn't do it,” Dave said.Christmas is the family's favorite holiday, but Marla said the house is seasonally appropriate every month of the year. Her October birthday nets her a lot of new decorations every year, so she is never in short supply.
“Everyone buys decorations for my birthday,” Marla said. “We'll go straight from this to Valentine's Day, then St. Patrick's Day, then Easter — I have tons of Easter stuff.”Although the decorating process can take hours and even days to complete, Marla and Dave each said the pleasing aesthetics are worth the time and effort. It has always been this way for the couple, according to Marla, who recalled a goal she made for herself while viewing some decorations she crafted years ago.
“We met 35 years ago in Florida and we had a little two-bedroom house and I said, 'I'm going to make these swags and someday we'll have a big old house and we're going to hang them,'” Marla said. “So, I made them back when I was 20-something, and now here we are.“I just love doing it.”
