A Yuletide Walk Through Roger’s Gardens

It can be tough sometimes to decorate the home for Christmas.  Sure, you have the same classic items that have dressed your home in December year after year, and they always have meshed perfectly with the aesthetic that you have created in your home from January through November.  However, when the Christmas season arrives, it always brings with it a desire to purchase brand spanking new accessories, baubles, and other items of sparkly yuletide goodness to add to your seasonal look.  While sometimes this is out of necessity – if you get a real tree every year, last year’s purchase simply won’t work anymore – there are other times where the urge to get new stuff to display around the house is an itch that simply must be scratched.  Of course, in order to truly satisfy this need, whatever you buy has to be beautiful, uniquely elegant, and can in no way come across as tacky.

Enter Roger’s Gardens in Newport Beach.  For most of the year, the venerable sprawling venue makes its bones as an excellent home and garden store.  Yet in the calendar’s final month, the place transforms itself into a magnificent shrine to the holidays; a place so filled to the brim with Christmas spirit, you swear you can feel snowflakes nestle upon you as they fall from the sky.  Its strength lies in the fact that, even if its address touts being in the middle of one of the country’s most exclusive cities, it still manages to carry a charming, homespun ambience that acts as a perfect manifestation of the Christmas spirit.  Indeed, stepping into Roger’s Gardens feels an awful lot like returning to your childhood home to visit your family.

This terrific feeling goes well beyond the fancy ornaments that hang proudly on the trees indoors, or the little toy train that scoots around the snowy village just outside the building, or even the Disney Gazebo in the outdoor gardens where Santa himself hangs out during the day.  Rather, the main source of joy that flows through the store’s sprawl comes from how all these elements present meld together to form a happy, wintry village steeped in rustic refinement.  Unlike the local department store or mall that has the elements of the outside world threatening to pounce upon you at every corner, Roger’s Gardens fashions the sights, the smells, and the textures of the season to strategically envelop you within the holiday charm with nary a hint of whatever may be going on outside of its walls.  This allows its patrons to lose themselves in the wonders of seasonal bliss while they shop for that perfect way to accentuate the time of year at home.

And they do have plenty of choices here to do just that.  Make no mistake:  The Christmas decorations and accessories that can be purchased at Roger’s Gardens are some of the most breathtakingly chic items that you can hope to find in OC.  Would the end-tables in your living room be seasonally enhanced by a pair of miniature, sliver-tinted Christmas trees?  It’s here.  Could the mantle above the fireplace benefit from a hand-painted figuring done in the style reminiscent of 19^th century Europe?  It’s here.  Is your Christmas tree in desperate need of the luck that only a Christmas pickle ornament can bring?  You had better believe it’s here.

Then again, even if you aren’t in the market to purchase anything for the holidays – at least, you don’t have the intentions to purchase anything for the holidays – it is absolutely worth your time and effort to come and explore Roger’s Gardens sometime before Christmas Day.  Even if you walk away from its winter wonderland empty-handed, you will leave completely filled to the brim with Christmas cheer.

By Rich Manning