How to Style a Mantel With Flameless Candles

The mantel is the one surface in my house that everybody looks at and nobody plans for. For years I did what I think most people do. I set three candles up there in October, moved them two inches to the left in December, and called it decorating. Before that I burned real pillars for about a decade and spent every January scraping wax off the brick with a butter knife. The wax was not the real problem. The real problem was that I had no order for putting things up there. The set of nine antizer flameless pillars I bought two Septembers ago solved the wax in one afternoon. The order took me a good deal longer.

What follows is the order I actually use now, twice a year, on the same mantel, with the same nine candles. Fall goes up the last week of September and Christmas goes up the weekend after Thanksgiving, and the only thing that changes between them is what sits around the antizer candles. If you have a mantel, a box of candles and no plan, this is a plan. It runs about forty minutes the first time and fifteen minutes every year after that.

Five Steps, Same Order Every Year

Step 1: Empty the shelf and measure the flat part

Take everything off. Not down to the candles, all the way down to the bare shelf. Every mantel I have ever been happy with started empty, and every one I have been annoyed by started with me trying to work around a pumpkin that was already sitting there. Ten minutes of bare shelf saves an hour of pushing things around.

Then measure the flat usable space and keep the number in your head. Mine is a little over five feet. That number is the reason I do not try to line up nine pillars in a single row, and it is the reason I stop adding seasonal pieces after three. Write it on the back of a receipt if you have to.

While the shelf is bare, look at what hangs above it. Mine has a mirror. If yours has a television, a painting, or nothing at all, that changes how tall your tallest candle can be. You want the top of the tallest pillar to land below whatever is up there, not level with it. Level with it looks like the candle is trying to be part of the artwork.

Before you buy anything, take a picture of the empty mantel and a picture of it the way it looks right now. I did this by accident one year and it turned out to be the most useful thing I ever did for that room. The photo shows you what your eye skips over in person, and what it usually shows is that everything on the shelf is the same height.

Step 2: Put the 9 inch pillar up first, and not in the middle

The 9 inch antizer pillar goes on before anything else, and it does not go dead center. Mine sits about a third of the way in from the left end of the mantel. Center makes the whole shelf look like a trophy display, and it leaves you with two equal halves to fill, which nobody ever fills well.

Off center is the change that made the biggest difference for me. When the tallest thing is not in the middle, your eye travels along the shelf instead of stopping. Everything you add after that has somewhere to go, and you stop feeling like you have to balance every single item with another one.

The mirror over my mantel does half the work, honestly. Whatever sits in front of it gets doubled, so one off center tall candle reads as two and the shelf looks fuller than it is. If you have a mirror, keep that tallest pillar slightly to one side of the center line and you get the same effect for free.

If your mantel is unusually long you can use the 8 inch pillar as a second anchor near the other end. Mine is not long enough for that and I do not try it. Two anchors on a five foot shelf just read as two separate decorations arguing with each other.

Step 3: Build down in height in two groups, not one long row

The antizer set is nine pillars: two 4 inch, two 5 inch, two 6 inch, one 7, one 8 and one 9, all 2.2 inches across. With the 9 already in place, I build a tight tall group around it using the 7 and one of the 6 inch candles. Then the remaining six run to the right in a loose line that steps down, ending with the two 4 inch pillars at the far end.

Keep the gaps inside a group smaller than the gaps between groups. That is the whole trick and it is the step most people skip. When everything is spaced evenly you get a fence, and a fence is what a mantel looks like when nobody was home to arrange it.

Stagger them front to back as well. Every pillar in this set is the same 2.2 inch width, so they line up very neatly, and that is the problem. Pull the short ones toward the front edge and push the tall ones back an inch or two. Then check the overhang. A pillar hanging past the shelf edge will get knocked off by somebody's sleeve in January.

The two 4 inch pillars are the ones I move around the most. Next to a 9 inch candle they can disappear, so I keep them at the far end where the arrangement is naturally lower and away from the mirror. On a short mantel, those two are the ones I would move to a side table instead. The set is listed for living rooms, dining rooms, bedrooms, kitchens and bathrooms, and a shelf in any of those is a fine home for the short ones.

The tallest candle does not go in the middle. Off center is what makes the shelf look like somebody thought about it.

Step 4: Add the seasonal layer around the candles, never in front of them

In fall, three of the small foam pumpkins go on the mantel around the antizer candles and I scatter a few of the fake maple leaves between them. These pumpkins are small, roughly three inches, and that is on purpose. A big pumpkin on a mantel crowds the candles and blocks the light, and the light is the only reason the candles are up there.

Set the pumpkins in the gaps between your two groups rather than in a row along the front edge. If a pumpkin sits directly in front of a pillar, the light lands on the pumpkin and you lose the glow on the wall behind it. The wall is where the warmth actually shows up in the evening.

With the leaves, scatter them and then nudge two or three. An evenly spaced scattering looks machine made. A couple of small clumps look like somebody dropped them there, which is exactly what you want on a mantel in October.

At Christmas the pumpkins come off and a shallow bowl of round ornaments goes into the same gap, with a few sprigs of greenery laid flat along the shelf. I do not move the candles at all. That is the part people miss. The candles are the constant and the seasonal pieces move around them. My garland stays on the staircase banister and never comes near the mantel, because nine feet of garland on a five foot shelf is a fight I have already lost.

Step 5: Set the remote and timer, then leave the room and come back after dark

The antizer set comes with a remote and a timer, and the pillars are battery powered. I set the timer at the start of each season and then I do not think about it again until January. I am the only one who touches the remote. Gary has never once asked me where it is, which tells you how much fiddling the thing actually needs.

I also check the pillars once in early December. If one is noticeably dimmer than the others, I deal with it then instead of discovering it on Christmas Eve with a house full of people. That check takes five minutes and it has saved me twice.

Before you call it finished, turn everything on and walk out of the room. Come back after dark with the overhead light off. Arrangements that look fine in daylight can look like a parking lot at night. You will see right away if a candle is too close to the edge of the mirror, or if the short group has disappeared into shadow.

One more thing, and it matters. These pillars are real wax and they are not for the porch. Mine live on the mantel and nowhere else. The pumpkins are the ones that go outside, on the covered porch table under the roof, out of direct rain. Those two jobs do not swap, no matter how good it would look from the driveway.

What Else Helps

The candles only do their work if the rest of the room is not competing with them. My tree stands in the living room front window, and it is the only lit thing in that window. If I had lights in the window, on the mantel and on the banister all at once, the room would read like a store display. One lit focal point in the window and one on the mantel is plenty.

Storage makes a bigger difference than people expect. If your candles come out of the basement in a shoebox every November, they come out scuffed and you stop bothering with them. The antizer pillars go back in the box they came in, on a shelf. My ornaments go into a fabric storage box with dividers, and it sits on a shelf beside it, never on the floor. Nothing has cracked since I switched.

It also helps to decide what the mantel is not for. Mine is not for cards, not for the nativity, and not for the school pictures. Those things are lovely and they live on the dining table and the bookcase. Every object you add to that shelf makes the candles less visible, and the candles are the reason the room feels warm at seven in the evening.

And buy one piece a year. That is what I have done for twenty four years in this house. The candles were one September, the pumpkins the year after, the storage box last January. Nothing was bought all at once and nothing has had to be redone. Take the five steps above, add one good piece each fall, and you will end up with a mantel that looks collected instead of purchased.

One lit thing in the window and one on the mantel. Any more than that and the room starts to look like a store display.