What a Life!

I love Christmas trees. When I was a kid, once I was old enough to put it together, it became my job…perhaps because no one else had gotten around to putting it up yet. Our tree was one of those where it had the letters on the branches for each size. The A-branches were at the top of the tree and the F-branches were down at the bottom. I’ve always enjoyed assembling furniture, and my favorite part of sewing is assembling things, so maybe that had something to do with it, too.

My mother always had coordinating decorations for our tree. The garland coordinated with the balls, and if something wasn’t part of the set, it didn’t go on the tree. As a kid, we had blue and silver garland, with little plain silver balls and big blue balls that each were the same color but were decorated a little differently – some with sprinkles, others plain. Then we had a strand of white lights and a strand of blue lights. Or something like that.

I don’t know if my parents still have that tree or not. I know for years now they’ve had real trees. A number of years ago (back when I was single), I was there one year when they took the tree down. They live out in the country – kinda – as in, you can light a fire in your back yard if you want to. Dad drug the tree out back and we were all out there when he lit it. When that thing caught, it went up so fast we literally had to run backwards twenty feet it was so hot. That was the end of my desire to have a real tree in my house. They get needles everywhere too, which is a pain. We have wood floors so they would get tracked everywhere instead of just getting stuck in the carpet. Not my cup of tea.

I know a couple years when I was single I had a tree. A real one. I decorated it with stuff like popcorn and cranberries on a string. As in, cheap. I didn’t have money to spend on garland and decorations and all that. After Steve and I got married, we didn’t have a tree right away. We wanted one, and every year our plan was to pick one up after Christmas. But every time we went shopping after Christmas, they were always sold out of the ones we liked, and we weren’t going to spend money – no matter how good of a deal we were getting – on a tree we didn’t like. So one year we finally took the plunge shortly before Christmas, when they had started to discount them, and bought ourselves a pre-lit 7.5′ tree. It’s a very pretty tree, and I so love not having to string lights.

We still have never gone out and bought a herd of coordinated decorations for it. I did buy ribbon to use as garland one year, though I bought two rolls and I should have bought three, I think. Otherwise, we just use decorations Steve already had – his mom had given him the ones they had when he was a kid – in addition to other ones we’ve picked up here and there.

And really, I’m kind of anti-theme as far as the tree decorating thing. If you have all sorts of unique ornaments, you can put anything you want on your tree. Well, within reason. The boys tried putting Steve’s shoe in the tree this year, and I had them take it down. There’s also a little ball of wadded up yarn tails that somebody stuck up there. Not. my. doing. It’s right in my line of vision when I look at the tree, but only when I’m sitting on the couch. As of yet, I have been too lazy to stop what I’m doing to get up from the couch and take it down.

One of our Christmas traditions is to add a new ornament to our collection every year. Last year, it was a set of apple ornaments. Steve wanted to hang an apple on the tree, and I could only find apple ornaments in sets of six. Then usually we get ornaments as gifts, though none yet this year.

This year we put all of our ornaments on the top half of the tree so Joey couldn’t reach them. While in past years our tree has looked rather bare, this year, the top half of our tree looks great. It finally has enough ornaments to look nice. Perhaps I need to accelerate the building of our ornament collection so next year the entire tree can look as nice as the top half looks this year.

We still need a star at the top of our tree. Right now we use this snowflake ornament that is this handmade crocheted thing with lots of starch to make it flat and stiff. It just kinda sits somewhere at the top.

My tree skirt is a cheap silver tablecloth I picked up somewhere. It works as long as no one tries to climb under the tree, which seems to be a favorite game this year so it’s kind of wosheled right now. I’ve seen some neat knitting patterns for tree skirts, and that’s what I really want to have, but I have not gotten around to selecting one, and once I do that, I have to buy the yarn and knit it up. Maybe next year.

Tomorrow: pictures of some of our favorite ornaments.