TELEVISION: GLAD TIDINGS SHE BRINGS

This is the season of gift giving, and so it seems fitting to ask: Is there a celebrity who has given us more than Martha Stewart? For the past five years she has gently elevated our taste with her monthly life-style manual, MARTHA STEWART LIVING, even sharing with us her instructive personal calendar (“December 20th: Pot up pastel calla lilies and freesias; December 26th: Off to Egypt with godchildren”). This year she has also graced us with her Martha by Mail product catalog, each item–like the set of “Araucana egg soaps”–a homage to muted chic. And now we have her second annual Christmas special: Welcome Home for the Holidays (Dec. 10, 8 p.m. ET, CBS).

Again, Martha teaches us much while leaving us yearning for much more. We learn to make a variety of wreaths, all of which, astonishingly, are different from the ones displayed in her magazine’s special November wreath issue. We see the holiday doyen package her Christmas cookies–alas, no recipes–in handsomely beribboned balsa-wood containers (not like those tacky doily-lined tins they throw at us on the Food Network). Best of all, we discover that Martha herself is far from infallible. “Do you know what I did last year?” she confides to her forester, “I covered my entire tree in blue angel hair. That was a mistake!”

All this plus Martha crafting swizzle sticks out of orange peels–yes, orange peels–not costly antique crystal. Few give credit to the stylemaker for her egalitarianism (in that spirit, one of her guests this year is the thinking man’s proletarian, Dennis Franz, who swings by Martha’s Connecticut home for a glass of punch). Throughout her holiday special Martha preaches cheap elegance, counseling us to wrap our gifts in inexpensive tulle and tissue paper, showing us how to make tree ornaments out of tin. “I’m trying to get back to handmade stuff,” she declares. “Christmas is too rushed, too harried, too expensive.” And too jam-packed with TV specials from less thoughtful personalities, like Kathie Lee Gifford. Could she teach us how to make pillows stuffed with balsam needles?

–By Ginia Bellafante