This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily on December 10, 2018
With too many to-do lists and obligations, and not enough eggnog — Christmas is coming. If you would like to remedy that imbalance, consider outsourcing the holiday season to experts, from wrapping gifts and trimming trees, to cooking turkeys and addressing cards. You deserve it.
Decorating your tree
Every Christmas tree selected and decorated by interior stylist Erin Swift and her Holiday Workroom team is one-of-a-kind, even when a client orders many for the same home. That was what happened last year, when they installed eight individually themed trees in a mansion in upstate New York, all in a day.
It was even tougher to transport a 10-ft fir through Soho’s streets and via a tiny elevator to the loft of an art-loving client wanting a tree that played off a favourite artwork: A giant day-glo piece by Robert Swain, known for trippy Pantone-like contact sheets. Swift festooned the custom tree with 2,000 lights and 500 ornaments, each painstakingly colour-matched to the blues and pinks in Swain’s artwork.
Neatness freaks need not fret, as Swift will tackle artificial and real trees. For the latter, Swift recommends the premium Balsam Hill to minimise needle-dropping. From US$1,000 (RM4,170) per tree.
Designing and addressing holiday cards
Bernard Maisner trained as a fine artist at Cooper Union in Manhattan, New York before turning to custom social stationery 20 years ago. He offers an off-the-peg line at Bergdorf Goodman alongside one-off designs. Bespoke clients can also hire him to address their envelopes, with various script styles from classic to flourished.
Of the Loeffler family, for whom he has created custom holiday cards for many years, Maisner said “we always meet in person at their home in New York and sit down for a creative discussion, often over a glass of champagne”. The most recent design was a complex hand-assembled card engraved in two colours with an interactive spinning arrow; Maisner hand-addressed each of the 300 envelopes accompanying the card, using the Loefflers’ favourite purple ink.
Card design and production, from US$2,000 (RM8,340) for 100 cards and envelopes. The spinner card, as described, cost US$12,000 for 300 cards and envelopes. Envelope-addressing, from US$3 per line.
Gift wrapping
Remember Candy Spelling’s notorious gift-wrapping room? If you have neither space nor inclination to install one of your own, hire Mia Canada. The Atlanta-based entrepreneur of That’s a Wrap! has spent the past eight years wrapping gifts throughout the year. An event planner by training, a local mall’s urgent last-minute request for gift-wrapping service changed Canada’s career. After a few hours poring over YouTube videos and some competitive shopping to see the standards set by Macy’s and others, she landed Candy Spelling’s dream job. Her team of a dozen works with corporate and private clients across the country; the gifts seen in Mark Wahlberg’s new movie Instant Family are Canada’s handiwork.
“I have a client who insists on waiting until the last minute to have them wrapped, because he does not want the family to find them. And it is well over 100 gifts because it is a huge family,” she said. “So each year, we are traditionally wrapping them well into Christmas morning. We have to dress as elves in case the children find us placing them under the tree.”
Prices vary, from US$10 (RM41.70) for a one-off gift to US$125 per hour for larger projects.
Cooking dinner
Christmas is one of the busiest periods for Dante Giannini of Farm to Fork. The former private chef for Jimmy Buffett now runs a company with 15 Michelin-level kitchen veterans on its roster. They have been hired by the likes of Paul McCartney, Debra Messing, and David and Lauren Lauren. He and his team are often tapped by clients juggling two Christmases.
Giannini’s crack kitchen team is not limited to working in New York. A festive client had whisked him off to Saint Barts for Christmas and New Year, bringing all his ingredients by helicopter and storing them on a refrigerated cargo barge. Plated dinners are US$100 (RM417) to US$225 per head, plus servers and bartenders.
Playing Santa
Tim Connaghan is the Ari Emmanuel of the North Pole, running the country’s largest Santa-for-hire agency. He personally understands the gig’s requirements, having channelled his inner St Nick for the first time in 1969 while in Vietnam: Sporting a foamy white beard made from Barbasol, he handed out gifts to his fellow soldiers.
His roster of Santas undergoes full background checks and wears custom-made suits, boots, belts and, most importantly, a tug-proof, all-natural beard.
Rural Santa fees start at US$75 (RM311) for a 30-minute visit and rise to US$200 per hour in cities; US$350 per hour in New York.
Absolutely everything else
Think of Lindsi Shine and her team at Insider NYC as real-life elves with the power to work magic. Every year, they are the behind-the-scenes team for a slew of VIP clients. They work on everything from holiday cards — she estimates that they handle about 5,000 every year — to gift-buying, for which Shine produces an exclusive in-house version of the Neiman Marcus catalogue, filled with impossible-to-find treats.
She estimates that they spend about 20% of their time during the holiday season handling decoration, from sourcing a local tree-trimmer for a client’s second home in Aspen, Colorado, or stepping in to help during an emergency.
“Last year, a client bought a new house in Pebble Beach [California], and we had two hours to get a tree for him when he asked,” Shine told Bloomberg on the telephone from her New York office. “So we persuaded the local Pottery Barn to take it off the floor and deliver it to their house. The store’s lead decorator went with it, so he could put everything back on the tree exactly as it was.” Even better, in January, Insider NYC will happily tackle the hassle of returning unwanted gifts.
Initial subscription: US$750 (RM3,127) per month for five hours, with additional hours charged at US$150. — Bloomberg