Thanks to the bounty of antique and authentic repro-ductions of vintage holiday decorations available in every price range online from sources as diverse as Target and Martha Stewart, it's easier than ever to create holiday experiences just like the ones we used to know.  So bring on the nostalgia in all your holiday entertaining.

No matter which 20th century decade's style resonates with you, it was Europe that created it, says Wendy Gay, a former Culinary Institute of America catering professor and current independent caterer in Atlanta.  "We took their traditions and refined them," she explains.  Take Santa Claus, for instance, who arrived in America as an amalgam of the English Father Christmas and the Dutch Sinterklaas.  Our Santa was equally likely to appear tiny or portly, and dressed in purple, green, blue, red, or fur, until 1885, when the American Christmas card was born,  bearing the image of a plump Santa in a red suit.  But it wasn't until the 1930s, when  the Coca-Cola Company decided to market its soft drink through Depression-era winters that Santa became jolly, ruddy-faced, and acquired white fur trim.  Thanks to a series of ads showing Santa enjoying Coca-Cola and receiving bottles of it as gifts, Santa became standardized.

Kathleen and Michael June founded Vintage Studio in New Paltz as a retirement business and a way for Kathleen to reconnect with "things near and dear to the heart," says Kathleen June, who is partial to selling items from her '50s and '60s childhood.  Starting in November, the newly expanded store will display Christmas decorations from throughout the 20th century along with a handmade fake cardboard fireplace reminiscent of the 1950s.

In the 1930s and '40s, elaborate, hand-fashioned landscapes and Lionel trains were featured beneath trees, with cotton matting for snow and sprinkled with mica chips for sparkle; tiny villages were purchased from stores like Woolworth's or hand-built; and ponds were made using mirrors topped with miniature skating figures.  In the 1950s snow-globes featuring winter scenes replaced toy trains.  "In the early 1960s kids would go to W.T. Grant's, get around the case and shake 'em all up," says June.  Candle figurines "that you would never burn" were also common in the 1940s to 1960s, says June.  "There were choir boys, never choir girls, and angels.  Every year they got yellower, but you'd keep putting them out."  Japanese pointsettia planters, popular in the '60s, "were little ceramic girls covered with glitter, wearing muffs and hats and capes.  You can still find them stamped  'Made in Japan,' like everything."

In 1900, only one in five families had a Christmas tree, according to the Herbert Hoover Museum's virtual exhibit, "An American Christmas" (www.hoover.archives.gov).  Fashion was moving away from Victorian excess and women's magazines advised against overwhelming trees with ornaments.  The fashionable "White Tree" style used only glittery cotton, angel hair, tinsel, pine cones, and icicles made of foil.  Gradually glass ornaments from Germany became popular but by 1914, World War I cut off their source.

Ethan Jackman of Vintage Village in Highland creates dioramas depicting American family Christmas celebrations from Dutch settlement in the 1600s to the present.  Hardest to find are antique lights.  "General Electric launched the electric Christmas light industry with a patent in 1882," says Jackman.  "Not many people afford lights, and many didn't have electricity - it was a luxury."  "People didn't trust lights," says June.  "They used candles and kept a bucket of water right next to the tree."  It wasn't until 1917 that dripless candles were made, so elaborately painted Christmas carpets caught the wax.  Christmas lights caught on in the 1940s when GE produced strings of them bearing Disney figureheads like Snow White and Cinderella.

In the 1920s trees were lavishly covered with glass and cotton ornaments, tinfoil icicles, and glass prisms.  Trees were "flocked" by spraying them with varnish and sprinkling them with cornstarch several times over - and creating a fire hazard in the process.  Artificial Christmas trees appeared in the late 1800s but weren't popular until 1913, when Sears Robuck sold trees made of turkey and goose feathers with berries.

Despite the Depression, Americans never gave up on Christmas.  In 1934, Fortune magazine predicted $25 million would be spent on Christmas ornaments.  Wire-wrapped glass ornaments were most popular, along with candy containers.  During World War II, buying Visca artificial trees and boxed sets of ornaments became patriotic.  Metal was scarce, so paper, foil, and cardboard ornaments were used instead.  After  World War II indestructible, American-made plastic shapes and Styrofoam balls covered in glitz replaced the now unpopular German glass.  "Sensational Sno-Flock" guns painted trees fire-retardent pink, white, or blue.

The Christmas tree had its heyday in the 1950s when Americans enjoyed the world's highest standard of living.  Live trees were abundant again, green or white plastic trees folded down for easy storage, and aluminum trees were decorated with foil ornaments, floodlit by revolving color wheels.  Bubble lights filled with water percolated when lit.

Sixties trees went monochromatic indoors - often flocked and floodlit blue - and big outdoors with displays of lights and plastic and wooden Santas and nativity scenes.  But the 1970s was a time of change, nostalgia and naturalism.  Fluourescent plastic ornaments glowed next to gingham bows, wooden figures, glazed bread dough, and dried flowers.

Christmas dinner should take all day to finally arrive, says June.  "It should be like Thanksgiving all over again, like in the film A Christmas Story, like you can't wait anymore."  Festive retro prints from the '50s, '60s, and '70s are widely available, or throw use your best lace tablecloth for an early 20th-century feeling.  "It's hard to try to come up with retro food because everybody's memories are different," says Tim Stutz, at Phoenix Rising, a Rhinebeck restaurant specializing in classic American cooking.  His nouveau comfort food includes "anything domestic" from pot pies to meatloaf.  His holiday catering menu includes pumpkin upside down cake and ginger brulee.  Plus, Gay points out, easy, updated recipes abound for traditional holiday treats like eggnog, plum pudding, divinity, pralines, peanut brittle, fudge, gingersnaps, lace cookies, ribbon cake, and peppermint bark.  So indulge, and remember!