Christmas arrived at the White House again this year with yet another unveiling of First Lady Melania Trump’s exquisite taste for classy decorations. The theme this time around: “American Treasures.”
A recently published video on the FLOTUS Twitter account reveals a White House awash with red and whites alongside elegant, yet subtle, homages to America’s “unique heritage,” from the Space Needle in Seattle to the Gateway Arch of St. Louis. Take a look:
“This is a joyous time of year when we decorate the White House for the Christmas Season,” the First Lady said in a statement regarding her decorations. “Our theme honors the heart and spirit of the American people. Thank you to the many volunteers and staff who worked hard to decorate the halls of the People’s House in Christmas cheer. On behalf of my family, we wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.”
This marks Melania’s second Christmas in which she’s been tasked with leading America into the most wonderful season of all. A recent White House statement claims she had been working on their design since August.
According to TIME, the White House Christmas tree is a “tall Fraser fir Christmas tree in the Blue Room is adorned with more than 500 feet of blue velvet ribbon embroidered in gold with each state and territory.” The tree hails from a farm in Avery County, North Carolina, and was hand-selected by the National Christmas Tree Association. Trees adorned with blue and gold are featured in the Vermeil room. A massive gingerbread white house that features a mini-Christmas wreath in every window was baked with 300 pounds of dough.
Throughout the month of December, Melania Trump will make the season bright by welcoming visitors from all walks of society for a special Christmas tour that will feature musicians, high school bands, choirs, and a whole lot of fine treats.
Last year, Melania Trump dazzled with the theme “Time-honored Traditions” by turning the White House into a winter wonderland of sorts, evoking that of a forest subdued by blankets of ice and snow:
Despite Melania’s fine tastes, leftist haters across the Twitterverse immediately blasted her vision as cold, remote, and even darkly twisted, likening the First Lady to some sort of frigid ice queen. Here’s how The Daily Beast summed it up last year:
Melania revealed her White House holiday decorations, floating through the East Wing in all white like a distressed spirit trapped between worlds. She glided past a bloodless White House replica done all up in white chocolate, past ballerinas in all white; she hovered down a corridor flanked with long white branches reminiscent of extremities stripped of their flesh, reaching for something both upward and inward. The branches were lit from below as though fleeing subterranean heat, like grasping hands emerging from graves, crops killed instantly in a flash freeze. For the first time in half a century, the creepiest thing about the East Wing wasn’t the gauzy, eerie portrait of Jackie Kennedy.
For this year, the Melania haters have wasted no time and are already out in force.
“How do wealthy people have such bad taste?” said novelist Molly Jong-Fast. “I would have excepted (sic) more from the third wife of the guy with the gold toilet.”
One Twitter user “fixed” the red trees to evoke the feminist dystopian show “The Handmaid’s Tale”:
Others were quick to say Melania Trump’s trees were covered in blood: