You may already have decorated your home to reflect the season, and although Christmas is not usually associated with feng shui, you can use feng shui principles to add positive energetic touches to your home for the holidays. Just follow these tips:

Minimize the excess

Put your Christmas decorations up later rather than sooner to heighten the specialness of the season. Decorating for Christmas too early — too much color, sound and energetic activity — can have a numbing effect and tire out the family.

Simplify

Take a good look at your decorations. Do you have items that you keep year after year “just because?” Get rid of outdated items and items that you don’t absolutely love or that are falling apart.

Direct energy up

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To create an uplifting mood, hang lights, garlands and ribbons at eye level or at least above the heart and in a manner that makes them “smile” (ends facing up). Any decorations with ends that hang down may create a depressed or subconscious negative energy.

Light from all angles

Avoid lighting that casts unnatural colors into the room. Use a combination of overhead and other lighting. Using only overhead lighting can create an energetic drain, causing discomfort and restlessness. As a complement to overhead lights, use holiday candles, side lamps and decorative table lighting to add the feeling of coziness.

Minimize red

Although red is a traditional Christmas color, it represents the fire element in feng shui, and too much of it can work against you. While having fire energy is positive and uplifting, an overload of fire can create over-excited energy and lead to emotional outbursts, burnout and fatigue. The low energy that many people feel after the holidays is often created by an unbalanced fire element in their Christmas decorations.

Use calm colors

As an alternative to red or to balance excessive red, use green as the base color for your decorations. Green brings in the element of wood and the color of healing to help relieve and defuse stress by bringing the essence of nature into your home. Blue and silver — a contemporary Christmas color combination — bring the water and metal elements into your home and promote a fresh, calming energy that can also be healing and supportive during the holiday season.

Light some candles

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Candles add positivity to the feng shui of a space on many levels, but the most overlooked benefit is that they purify the energy in a space (especially if you use soy or beeswax candles). Fire cleanses the energy, and the soft glow it creates soothes emotional imbalance. Use candles in your bedroom and bathroom, or at the dining table, or in the living room.

Stimulate your olfactory senses

The air you breathe has a profound effect on your mood. Use pure essential oils to introduce a fresh fragrance and to add to the positive ambiance. Pine, cypress, eucalyptus, sweet tangerine and lemon are detoxifying, cleansing and rejuvenating, while cinnamon and cloves are calming and create harmonious energy.

Bring in cleansing plants

In addition to your regular houseplants, bring in at least one or two air purifying plants to add beauty and grace to the space, clean the air, and clear and calm the energy. In Hawaii, some easy-to-acquire air purifying indoor plants are the Peace Lily, the Areca palm and the Dracaena Janet Craig.

A Feng Shui Christmas

Feng shui is all about creating a home that has healing and nourishing energy, a must during the holiday season. Remember, if you take care of the quality of the energy in your home, your own energy gets stronger and more balanced, a perfect transition for your whole family as you prepare to move into 2012!

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Feng shui expert and life guide Alice Inoue offers books, DVD’s, workshops and private consultations. Visit www.aliceinspired.com.