For true Christmas aficionados, though, that's barely a start. For them, decking the halls is a marathon sport requiring a truckload of seasonal accoutrements.

Why have just one Christmas tree when you can have three, one wreath when you can have 10, their line of thinking goes. For these super-decorators, a whole-house holiday wonderland is the goal.

"That's if I don't kill myself every day, if I play some music and have some joy in it," says Frank, a former New York floral designer whose home is filled with the Scandinavian and German Christmas decorations she has collected for decades and the greenery arrangements she creates.

Frank, whose holiday-decor items fill 20 large plastic storage tubs in her basement the rest of the year, decks everything from the chandeliers to her kitchen's pot rack with festive greens.

Ditto the living room mantel, whose garland of evergreen boughs, pinecones and holly berries is decorated with glass Christmas balls and apples. All of it is faux, as are the apples and oranges that hang on red ribbons from a beam in her kitchen.

"We used to do real ones, but they didn't hold up," says the German-born Frank, 60, who did the same sort of lavish decorating in the New York apartment she and her husband, David, lived in before moving to this area five years ago.

Besides the main tree in the living room, Frank decorates two smaller trees inside and one outside the house.

Even the plates and pictures that hang on her walls are switched out for holiday-themed images, including a collection of needlepoint pieces.

And nearly every shelf and tabletop in the place becomes a stage for one of Frank's elaborate Christmas tableaux, which often feature tiny potted evergreen trees, topiarylike German "spice bouquets," and tomten - mythical gnomelike figures associated with Christmas in Scandinavia.

There's a classic Nativity set in the hall, Santa figurines and antique carved wooden deer in the living room, and, on a sideboard in the kitchen, her newest acquisition - the convincingly real-looking gingerbread house she picked up at one of her favorite Christmas decor haunts, Waterloo Gardens.

"You can detail things to death. And it's a fine line between classy and junky. I always walk that tightrope."

The slippery slope of excess is something Kim Raftery, too, is keenly aware of as she readies her Collegeville home for the holidays.

Raftery begins putting on the yuletide touches right after Thanksgiving. The effort takes as much as two full days, and it extends well beyond the living room, to the bathrooms and her two daughters' bedrooms.

"I must have 10 bins of stuff. But I try to do things tastefully, so it's not this cheesy, overdone Christmas house."

Raftery credits her mother with inspiring her holiday tradition - she started handing over boxes full of the Christmas decorations Raftery remembered from her childhood.

Her prized holiday objects now include 1970s hand-painted ceramic Christmas trees, a
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