‘Every Christmas Decorator’s Dream Come True’
Ornaments, florals and ribbons make up a Delaware woman’s unforgettable White House Christmas decorations volunteer experience.
Editor’s note: It is First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in 1961 who is credited with establishing the selection of a theme for the Official White House Christmas tree. That year, Mrs. Kennedy chose a “Nutcracker Suite” theme that showcased handmade ornaments depicting toys, birds and angels from Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker” ballet, according to the White House Historical Association. And noted about the ornaments was how they were crafted by disabled volunteers and senior citizens throughout the country.
The tradition of enlisting the talents and dedication of volunteers since then has evolved into a highly competitive selection process. Some 12,000 people apply for the more than 100 or so slots available over the Thanksgiving holiday week when volunteers from across the United States and its territories descend on the White House to transform it for the holiday season in a matter of days.
East Wing Magazine spoke with a few of the 2025 volunteers who helped decorate the White House for the first Christmas season First Lady Melania Trump has hosted since returning to the White House for her husband’s second term—a season that also included fewer decorations for a scaled back tour as a result of the demolition of White House East Wing to make way for President Trump’s planned White House Ballroom. Here is the first in a series of one-on-one volunteer profiles.
When Teresa “Pie” Truono, a wife and mother of two grown children from Wilmington, Delaware, first saw President George W. Bush on television mention the hard work and dedication of volunteers who help decorate the White House for Christmas, it was a light-bulb moment.
“That’s what I want to do,” Truono recalls in a recent Zoom interview with East Wing Magazine.
It wasn’t a lofty goal or just a passing thought, at least not to the 55-year-old Truono. Since then, for more than a decade starting with First Lady Michelle Obama’s first holiday season in the White House, Truono has submitted application after application. Then one day in 2020, the White House came calling.
The Christmas spirit
Truono’s love for Christmas dates back to her 1970s and 1980s childhood. On a Black Friday when she was around 9 years old, she recalls pushing her mom to put up the Christmas tree. And although her mom “wasn’t like that,” it was the Christmas spirit that swept Truono and has ever since.
Anyone who knows Truono also knows that about her. Married now for 29 years and the business manager of her husband’s dental practice, her home, inside and out, is fully decorated for Christmas by the first week of November. She is particularly proud of the three separate Christmas villages with a working train, three Christmas trees, a collection of Mark Roberts fairies in every room of her home and her Santa art hung in place of their nonseasonal wall art.
Outside, their house is equally festive. It’s lit up with multiple strands of holiday lights and decorated with vintage blow mold holiday figures, wreaths on every door, a 30-foot flagpole Christmas tree and an 8-foot-tall Santa. Truono is an avid collector of Christmas ornaments when she travels and particularly of the ornament collection from the White House Historical Association.
Annually, her yuletide cheer spills into work and philanthropy. Truono decorates the dental office with a theme for the office tree that draws patients to book their appointments during the holidays to see the decor. And over the years, she has given back in the form of decorating, volunteering and donating. Her charity work includes decorating Christmas trees for a hospice fundraiser where the trees are auctioned off and supporting Stocking for Soldiers and other businesses in her area.
Perhaps what sets Truono apart is her unshakeable will to achieve goals that, even to her family, seem a little out of reach. Like the time in the 1990s when she set out to compete in the Miss Delaware USA beauty pageant. She was in her early 20s and in 1994, it was the first pageant she had ever entered. She ultimately won. And later on as an avid horse rider, Truono decided she wanted to compete in a side-saddle competition. With the help of the late, champion side-saddle rider Susan Sisco, Truono spent less than two years training before eventually competing in 2019 in the Ladies Side Saddle Division at Pennsylvania’s Devon Horse Show, the country’s largest and oldest outdoor, multi-breed horse show. She placed fifth. It, too, was her first time competing.
So, undeterred by a decade of unanswered applications to the White House, it makes sense how Truono’s can-do spirit combined with her holiday and giving spirit eventually shined through.
“I really don’t know where it came from,” Truono says of her zest for holidays. “It’s just something I’ve been really passionate about my whole life.”
When service calls
By the time First Lady Melania Trump’s team from the White House let Truono know she was selected as a Christmas decorations volunteer during the first Trump term in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic was still spreading with millions of cases being reported worldwide. Her stint was shortened as a result of testing positive for COVID, although it was a false-positive at the time.
When she applied this year, to her surprise, she was again selected. Volunteers for the holiday decor are typically split into three groups that work at the beginning of the week or the end of the week or the entire week. Truono worked the front end of the week assigned to team “Frosty” at an undisclosed, offsite location where she collected, sorted and packed ornaments, florals and ribbons for each individual tree throughout the Executive Residence. She even had a hand in helping assemble the Lego mosaic portrait of President George Washington before it was delivered to the White House where it would be displayed along with another Lego portrait of President Donald Trump in the Green Room. She didn’t know that at the time, though, noting the room designs are kept secret early on.
“It’s so exciting because you just don’t know how this is going to turn out,” she says.
On her final day volunteering, Truono worked inside the White House where she spent the entire day lighting Christmas trees in the East Room. It’s a task, she says, that takes an unexpected, lengthy amount of time because it requires an exact method of lighting each and every branch of the tree toward the tree trunk and back out.
“They like it very clean and neat,” Truono says.
When she finished on that Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the decor had just barely begun to take shape. But, what did start to form in those few days were friendships with other volunteers who all came together for a common purpose. Truono was impressed by the caliber of the volunteers she met, which included a female military pilot who flew on and off aircraft carriers and another who worked in aerospace engineering.
On the day before the White House opened for public tours of the Christmas decorations, Truono returned to the White House along with all the volunteers and attended a private reception hosted by the first lady thanking them for their efforts and affording them the opportunity to see the finished product themed “Home Is Where the Heart Is.”
“It’s hard to imagine when you have ribbons and florals in a pile,” Truono says.
The big reveal didn’t disappoint. Looking back on when it all came together, Truono described it as “so, so beautiful.”
When it comes to decorating the White House for Christmas, Truono sees her volunteer work as a service to the country. The staff, planners, organizers, decorators and volunteers—they all put their hearts into the job and they do it for the country regardless of political views, she says. There’s no talk of politics. “We’re talking Christmas right now,” she says.
And as people from around the United States and the world take in the White House Christmas decorations, Truono can’t help but revel a little about her hand in it. “This is like every Christmas decorator’s dream come true,” she says. “This is the ultimate trophy.”