Melissa Wood David Petty

Related Articles

Inspired by the grand eighteenth-century home she fell in love with a decade before becoming its proud owner, Angela Ackroyd brings Christmas to life in all its glory in her family’s Newburyport, Mass., manor. In full holiday splendor, the elegant High Street home is dressed up in forty-eight wreaths, fifteen Christmas trees and countless displays of garlands, Santas, and snowmen—each room decorated around a different theme. Angela does all of this, with help from husband, Rand, and their son, Cuyler, 10, with a thoughtful organization that makes everything come together magnificently for holiday entertaining and infectious Christmas cheer.

Angela remembers a man on a holiday house tour one year, on which the home has been featured twice, who she thought looked as if his wife had to drag him onto the tour. But even the Grinch himself could not resist the festive atmosphere at the Ackroyds, and the man admitted that their home did the trick of putting him into a holiday spirit.

“It’s nice to have people come appreciate and enjoy it,” says Angela who recalls another time noticing a woman on the tour who she thought had already toured the house. Angela asked if she had gone through before, and the woman told her she had but then got back in line to see the house again.

Built between 1790 and 1792, the house was first owned by a Newburyport ship owner, and sits on its original half-acre lot. Angela says they are only the seventh family to own the house, and despite all those years, the historic details have been left almost wholly intact, with original walls and high ceilings that have never been carved up into smaller apartments.

Angela first fell in love with the house when she moved to Newburyport in 1985 although at the time there was no for-sale sign. “This was always my favorite house,” she says.

Ten years later, after Angela and Rand had married and moved away, the house was put on the market, and the couple, who were looking into moving back to the Newburyport area, went in to take a look around. However, Rand did not at first share his wife’s affection for the house.

“He walked in the front door and walked out the back and said, ‘very museum-like,’” says Angela, who agrees that it was decorated much more formally back then. The couple continued looking for a home in the area, but Angela only had eyes for the house on High Street. Fortunately, it stayed on the market, and more than a year later when Angela was pregnant with Cuyler, the couple bought it.

That first Christmas in the house the family put a tree in the family room, with “prickly needles” so that the baby Cuyler would not pull the ornaments off the tree. He still managed, grabbing them very carefully, remembers Angela. Today every room—including the bathrooms—has a tree with its own theme that coordinates with the colors in the room and is complemented by a matching swag over the fireplace mantle, additional decorations and even gifts wrapped in coordinating wrapping paper under the trees. The idea for themed trees came when the couple spent their first Christmas together and Rand’s tree had a hodgepodge of ornaments, while Angela had already begun a collection of cherished ornaments. “I said, ‘I’m not putting my nice ornaments on that tree,’” jokes Angela, and so the couple put an additional tree up in the dining room.

Each year Angela begins decorating  on October first, starting upstairs, and tackling one room at a time.

“The neighbors all ask when it’s going to start,” says Angela, who notes that “December first is when we turn the lights all on,” a day that is extra special because it is also Cuyler’s birthday.

When it’s all done, Christmas trees, coordinating swags and decorations can be found in every room with themes that include snowmen, birdhouses, fruit, Colonial Williamsburg, homespun, antiques, angels, a Swedish tree, and even two Mickey Mouse trees in Cuyler’s bedroom and bathroom.

An incredible amount of detail ties in each room’s holiday decorations to a theme, as well as to the room’s furnishings and decor. In the sitting room at the front of the house, Angela coordinates the room’s furniture and Nantucket-themed Christmas decorations to match the golden sands and blue waters of a scene of Newburyport’s Plum Island, painted over the fireplace by a houseguest in the late eighteen hundreds who, Angela says, painted the scene as a gift to make up for staying longer than anticipated. Below on the mantle, large golden letters proclaim “Noel” and a swag is dotted with miniature Nantucket baskets, golden starfish and blue and gold ribbons, all coordinating perfectly with the room’s tree, which has a full-size Nantucket basket balancing on the top.

An army of snowmen takes over the kitchen, a room where the original hearth seamlessly blends in with a recent addition. Snowmen of different sizes, expressions, and poses perch on shelves and cover the branches of a Christmas tree in the corner. 

Angela calls the tall Christmas tree in the comfortable family room, also part of the addition, the “Norman Rockwell” tree because of its traditional decorations. The tree, which is Rand’s favorite, stands about a story and a half tall and looks out a large window into the backyard. Underneath the tree, a train circles an elaborate snowy seaside village that Cuyler sets up every Christmas.

The couple spares no effort is in decorating the outside of the house either. A wreath adorns every window and colorful displays of fruit welcome carolers and guests at both the front and back doors. The scene won first prize for outdoor display in last year’s holiday decorating contest held by the Newburyport Garden Club.

Angela, who is an electrical engineer, takes a creative, thoughtful approach to holiday decorating, finding ornaments and ideas everywhere. “If you have a good eye, you can find stuff a lot of different places,” she says. On a trip to Raleigh-Durham, N.C., she found pinecones larger than the ones in New England and so  brought them back with her on the plane as carry-on luggage. “I had a big laundry bag from the hotel room filled with pinecones,” she says. Angela also sprays gold paint onto sand dollar shells collected during a vacation and large clamshells she purchased from a cooking store, which make up a wreath on the inside of the front door.

“You don’t have to spend a lot of money if you’re creative,” notes Angela, who says that she won’t spend more than five dollars on an ornament.

A neighbor calls the barn “Santa’s workshop” since Rand, a mechanical engineer, and part-time woodworker, builds many of the displays from his workshop within.

“My husband’s really creative, too so I’ll give him a picture and say go make this,” says Angela. One year she asked for an artificial tree that was tall yet skinny enough to fit by the door in the front hall. At the time, it was difficult to find artificial trees that were anything but traditional size and shape. Rand went to K-mart, bought two Martha Stewart four-foot trees, and fashioned them into one perfect looking eight-foot tree.

Angela has discovered that the house’s holiday cheer affects even those who have never been inside. Once she was at a party where one of the guests mentioned how much she loved a certain house on High Street that was always decked out for the holidays, with wreaths on every window. It was, of course, the Ackroyd home. “That’s my house,” said Angela, who naturally invited the woman for a visit, “I love it too.”