It took a week but I’ve finally gotten my tree decorated. Josie has been my right hand man on this job for the last fifteen years and she was willing to help this year but between work, work and work, she never had time. We thought we had a plan last week but our wires got crossed. We did have time to watch some Firefly but not to decorate the tree. Priorities.
I like a lot of lights on my tree. I may even go overboard. I like to wrap each branch with lights. My tree is a three part, umbrella style design. Yes, it’s real. It’s artificial but it’s not imaginary. And those trees you get in a lot are not ‘live’, they’re dead. Artificial trees are way easier to light than dead ones; you can light one part at a time. I wrap all the branches on the bottom part, then add the middle, wrap those branches, then wrap the tree top and finally plug that into the tree and the lights into the wire that I’ve left strategically waiting. This year, I ran out of lights long before I got to the top. You always lose a few strings over the summer but half mine were dead when I pulled them out of storage. I usually have to make a trip or two to the store for more strings in the course of decorating so this year wasn’t unusual. In fact, what was unusual was that the first store I went to actually had lights left on the shelves. There have been years when I’ve had to relight the tree because no new strings were to be had for love nor money.
The only strings available were twinkling lights, which I really like, so I didn’t mind paying the buck extra per box.
It took three days and two trips to the store but by the time I got to the top of my tree, I had 1500 lights on it.
Then I turned my attention to the mantle. Our mantle spans the entire wall; about 15 feet. I have two green garlands I place all the way across it and ten little 5” Santa figurines that I place in the greens. This year I lit it with white lights but sometimes I use colors. Our collection of personalized, needlepoint stockings hangs beneath the mantle and our collection of White House Christmas ornaments hangs from the greenery, over the front of the mantle. It’s gorgeous. It also doesn’t work without an extension cord and sometime between last Epiphany and now, all our extension cords disappeared.
I don’t even care what happened to them all. I just sent Jay to the store to get me a new one.
A few days later, I pulled up my six large boxes full of ornaments and set to work on finishing the tree. Now that I have grandkids, I couldn’t just hang the ornaments willy –nilly. I have about seventy needlepoint ornaments. They go on the bottom half of the tree because they’re unbreakable and little kids love them. Half of them are personalized teddy bears, mostly with school logos for all the schools the kids have graduated from or institutions Jay has coached at.
I hung the last of the ornaments on the tree when I noticed that one of the strings of lights down at the bottom had gone out.
Oh well. I will not let that bother me.
The decorations are finally up and everything looks great. Now all I have to do is bake cookies, watch Holiday movies and stay warm.
I love winter.