Christmas Home

Drake McDonald from One Hope Church in Tuscaloosa, AL brings us this awesome Christmas setup.

Lead Pastor: “I want the Christmas set to feel like I’m walking into my living room on Christmas morning.”

From Drake: The fireplace was the first project we tackled. It’s constructed of cardboard moving boxes on a 1″x frame, with a front flat constructed from foamcore fastened to the front. The flat and the bottom boxes (the ‘legs’ of the fireplace) are covered in peel and stick white brick wallpaper.

Next came the bookshelves. We were originally planning to use a pair of photo backdrops we’d ordered, but when they arrived they were too small, and didn’t match the scale of the fireplace. So we cut them up, scanned, scaled and reprinted certain shelves of books (depending on the perspective), and taped them to white coroplast that we’d painted with a grey wash paint to match the perspective we were going for in the shelves.

Then we wrapped some boxes in various colors of wrapping paper, and topped them with bows we had from previous years’ sets. The trees we also already had from previous years. We decided we were only going to decorate one tree, and situated the others on the margins of the stage to make them look like “outside” trees. We elevated our main tree on a piece of portable stage we had sitting around, and added another stage piece to the front of our choir levels to make a bigger space for our living room furniture. The couch came from the executive pastor’s office; the chairs and table came from the lead pastor’s office.
The snowy forest graphics came from churchmotiongraphics.com, and I overlaid a window I found on canva pro (after cutting out the window panes), then added the “One Hope Christmas” graphic our communications coordinator had created to the middle window.