• Balance traditional with trends when decorating Christmas trees for public display.Andrew Dernie/Photodisc/Getty Images
  
  Macy's decorates its stores each holiday season. Visual merchandisers spend months planning decorations for the store's Christmas trees that are featured throughout the store and in its window displays. Although there are countless ways to decorate a Macy's store Christmas tree, the idea is to come up with decorations that have mainstream appeal in order to attract the most customers to the store.
  
  

Tell a Story

• In 2009, a Macy's creative director in Chicago designed an entire them around "The Journey of a Letter to Santa". The decorations were meant to tell a story about a letter on its way to the North Pole. You can decorate a Christmas tree with this theme by including envelops of letter addressed to Santa Clause, over flowing mail bags, large holiday-themed postal stamps and miniature mailboxes with their red flags up.
  
  

Children-Themed

• Among the decorations featured on Macy's Christmas trees are ones that feature children's movie characters and animations. In the past, Macy's has featured Mary Poppins and Cinderella recreating the fairytales as ornaments for the tree. You can decorate a tree that highlights a more recent animation. For example, a holiday Toy Story with characters and toys made of colorful papier-mache ornaments. Wright's Home and Garden, a retail store, paid tribute to the movie Happy Feet by recreating the "March of the Penguins" for one of its trees. The tree was filled with red tinsel and ornaments of penguins in tuxedos.
  
  

Charitable Cause

• Decorate a tree to encourage charitable giving or promote a nonprofit organization in the community. Take holiday photos of dogs and cats at the nearby animal shelter. Place the pictures in tiny frames with their names on the front and a short description of each pet on the back that can hang on the tree. Place miniature dog bones, houses and toys on the tree to help tie the theme together. Encourage people to donate money or time to help a dog or cat that needs a loving home. For example, Neiman Marcus made a tree completely of books one year and after the season ended, the store donated the books to a nonprofit organization that supplies books to needy children.