We have become the sorts of people who have multiple Christmas trees.
I know how this happened, and to be honest it wasn’t really an excess of Christmas spirit. That sort of spirit has been hard to come by in recent years, and this year has been particularly elusive for a lot of reasons. It’s hard to be festive when the world conspires against it, and defiance will only get you so far.
Following along with the tried and true strategy of “fake it ‘til you make it,” however, we have been getting things decorated anyway. Over Thanksgiving Oliver, Maxim and I set up the long strand of blue lights that we always have across the front of the house, and Kim has continued her newfound tradition of putting more blue lights – the kind that blink in random patterns – on the broccoli stalks that still stand in the raised bed garden in the front lawn and you have to admit that is a rather sneakily cheerful thing to do.
But normally this sort of thing requires only one Christmas tree.
We even upgraded that last year and got one that is bigger and rounder than the one we’d been using for a while in order to keep that number at one, which of course speaks to the main problem. We simply have more ornaments than can comfortably be placed on a tree.
We have our own ornaments, some of which we have acquired over the years and some of which were given to us as gifts. There are the ones that the kids made when they were younger, which of course have sentimental value. I have two Gritty ornaments that Kim got for me. We finally remembered to bring the box of ornaments that I inherited from my mom a couple of years ago up from the basement, many of which are either gorgeous – my mom had a pretty good eye for these things – or sentimental or both. And we have my burgeoning collection of “travel ornaments,” which is a nice way of saying “keychains.” This is mainly my project, though Oliver and Lauren contribute to it as well. Mostly I pick these things up wherever we end up traveling because they are inexpensive, indestructible, and a nice reminder of good times. And since we’ve also become People Who Travel – an odd thought, but not one I’m complaining about – there are a lot of those.
So this year Kim bought a small tree just for the travel ornaments. It’s not short, but it’s kind of thin and it has a festive “blue and white” color scheme that isn't really obvious from the photo. It came prelit with bright white LED lights, which give all of the ornaments a kind of backlit feel to them. It’s a nice way to both highlight and quarantine all the keychains and the like.
We had to figure out where to put it, since the main tree has its own spot and the living room didn’t really have a space for a second tree, and eventually we decided that the dining room was fine. Midgie agreed.
I know how this happened, and to be honest it wasn’t really an excess of Christmas spirit. That sort of spirit has been hard to come by in recent years, and this year has been particularly elusive for a lot of reasons. It’s hard to be festive when the world conspires against it, and defiance will only get you so far.
Following along with the tried and true strategy of “fake it ‘til you make it,” however, we have been getting things decorated anyway. Over Thanksgiving Oliver, Maxim and I set up the long strand of blue lights that we always have across the front of the house, and Kim has continued her newfound tradition of putting more blue lights – the kind that blink in random patterns – on the broccoli stalks that still stand in the raised bed garden in the front lawn and you have to admit that is a rather sneakily cheerful thing to do.
But normally this sort of thing requires only one Christmas tree.
We even upgraded that last year and got one that is bigger and rounder than the one we’d been using for a while in order to keep that number at one, which of course speaks to the main problem. We simply have more ornaments than can comfortably be placed on a tree.
We have our own ornaments, some of which we have acquired over the years and some of which were given to us as gifts. There are the ones that the kids made when they were younger, which of course have sentimental value. I have two Gritty ornaments that Kim got for me. We finally remembered to bring the box of ornaments that I inherited from my mom a couple of years ago up from the basement, many of which are either gorgeous – my mom had a pretty good eye for these things – or sentimental or both. And we have my burgeoning collection of “travel ornaments,” which is a nice way of saying “keychains.” This is mainly my project, though Oliver and Lauren contribute to it as well. Mostly I pick these things up wherever we end up traveling because they are inexpensive, indestructible, and a nice reminder of good times. And since we’ve also become People Who Travel – an odd thought, but not one I’m complaining about – there are a lot of those.
So this year Kim bought a small tree just for the travel ornaments. It’s not short, but it’s kind of thin and it has a festive “blue and white” color scheme that isn't really obvious from the photo. It came prelit with bright white LED lights, which give all of the ornaments a kind of backlit feel to them. It’s a nice way to both highlight and quarantine all the keychains and the like.
We had to figure out where to put it, since the main tree has its own spot and the living room didn’t really have a space for a second tree, and eventually we decided that the dining room was fine. Midgie agreed.
The angel on the top is from my parents. They bought that in 1963 for their first Christmas together. It seems happy there.
The main tree is in the usual spot in the living room and we spent most of Sunday decorating it since there was a dense fog advisory here in Our Little Town and I’d already done the grocery shopping and all the grading I planned to do for the end of the semester. We weren't going anywhere. It was a good window of time to get the tree up.
Right now we’ve kind of stalled a bit, since the trees are basically done and now we need to figure out how much else to put out and how much just to pack away again for next year. We have surprisingly few open horizontal spaces to put things, it turns out.
As problems go, it’s not so bad.
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