It's no secret that the first time you hit the switch for the lights on the Christmas tree it's an exciting moment. Yesterday Happy Husband put our tree up, the girls decorated it, and I re-threaded ornaments back onto their strings after they had inexplicably freed themselves over the last 11 months while encapsulated in their boxes, while hidden inside a bigger box. Last year we overloaded the tree with tinsel and paper flowers, as well as baubles of all sizes and colours, and it was a bit too much.
This year, it's still a 'busy' tree, especially down low where the girls can reach, but the pink, blue, purple and aqua coloured decorations cover all the 'favourite-colour' bases for our family of four, and the LED strip lighting which we trialed this year, spiraling up the center of the tree gives it all a shimmering icy sparkle.
Every family has a Christmas tree tradition, and every one of those traditions has at least one story behind it. When we were little putting up the tree involved driving to the woods near my maternal grandparents' house, there were home-made decorations and the ever-present smell of pine needles rotting in the summer heat. It's been a long time since then, and I still remember it clearly.
Four years ago when I bought 'my family' tree, I chose white. We had decided against fir trees because there were none grown responsibly in our area, and because of the heat, and the pine needles falling within reach of the babies. I felt that you can't really replicate the real thing, so once I had decided on a forever-fake I felt something other than green was more suitable, and Ye Olde Christmas Tree Shoppe was able to oblige. Red and black were both eye catching but a tad masculine in a house of girls, and the silver was too pricey. There's now some fun pink ones (Happy Hubby would faint!) but white is ours now. It suits our house, and in the mid-Summer heat, there's something cooling about its snow-white presence while the temperature soars.
O Christmas tree, Oh Christmas tree, we love you because your ours...!
I'll set up a poll just to the right, to see how others feel about tree selections - are you passionate about real, faux-fir, or is free-choice the important thing? Click your choice, and let's see what happens.
