Oh, don't remind me that Christmas Tree season is almost here. I despise the things and, try as I may to sabotage the whole event, I somehow always cave in and find myself snapping photos of my over-bundled children as they desperately try to keep up with their daddy. He plows his way through the knee-deep snow (keep in mind that knee-deep on my husband is about 10" of snow and waist-deep on the baby), through row upon row of sap-producing, needle-tossing, water sucking, spray painted, trimmed-to-perfection bushes. It pains me to decide which of the perfectly manicured shrubs to select, remove from its current location and bring into my home. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is just the beginning.
Once the tree is home the fun can truly begin, as I pull out and untangle the lights that I hope still work (at least for one more year), then proceed to walk in circles trying to hang the lights I hope will work once I get them up on the now dying and soon to be dead tree. Then I get to open the boxes upon boxes of "ornaments" and remove them from their mounds of tissue paper to place them on the tree, pretending not to know I will be removing, rewrapping and re-boxing them ALL in just a few short weeks. All this while warning my children to "JUST LEAVE IT ALONE!"
I truly, on so many different levels, do appreciate and desire a Charlie Brown Tree. It is simple, it is NATURAL, and it is unique. This year I simply gave up. I untangled and hung the lights that happened to only function part of the season; I hung two strands of beads and two strands of metal hearts; I allowed the girls to hang candy canes and that was ALL. As close to simple as I could get my family to accept. And even still I overheard Josh comment that it was the most boring Christmas tree he'd ever seen.
Beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder, because I thought, and still think it was BEAUTIFUL. Yet another example of how minimalist I truly am. Maybe one year as a gift to me, we could just scratch the whole real tree thing and simply decorate the front window like one of Anthropologie's window displays, which, by the way, I spent half of one free afternoon simply admiring. Sounds pretty cynical I know, I just do not understand what joy there is pulling things out only to put them away…not for a tree. Someone please provide a worthwhile reason for enduring this ritual.
2 comments:
"Your stunned silence is very reassuring." Roz from Monsters Inc.
I put the kids in charge of Christmas this year, and it changed my cynicism completely. Your day is coming too. :)
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