If you’ve been following the saga of my christmas tree on Facebook, these will be familiar to you. To sum up, we weren’t supposed to be here at Christmas so all of our Christmas items are in storage. No tree, no decorations, no big deal. Last year I think I stacked a few presents on our coffee table and that was as decorative as we got.
HOWEVER, when our neighbors moved out this summer they had a Christmas tree that they used while they were here and they didn’t need to take it with them (since they’d be getting all their regular Christmas decorations out of storage) so they gifted it to us. It’s been sitting in the storage closet under our stairs — until yesterday.
Thanksgiving came and went and it was time to get in the Christmas spirit, but I wasn’t feeling it. Since the boys didn’t even know we had a tree here, I didn’t need to bother getting it out, right? Um, not according to my Facebook friends. After a long “discussion,” and lots of decorating suggestions, I caved and got out the 7.5 foot naked monstrosity.
The first tier of 3. The stand was a pain to put together (as Charlynn warned), but Carter and I managed to get the tree up with only a little bit of lean for Josh to fix when he got home. Later that night Josh and I went out and after our dinner/coffee date, we picked up a few of the ugliest ornaments we could find.
This plastic/metal disc is “decoratively” blackened and tarnished.
This is supposed to be Santa — with a green crown and a green nose . . .
The sparkly plastic mushroom is my favorite. Our friends who lived in the middle east for several years said part of the fun of Christmas overseas is seeing what sort of decorations non-Westerners create in an attempt to copy a western Christmas. I have to say that I’ve never associated fungi with our Lord’s birth before today.
We also picked up some super obnoxious lights that flash and play christmas songs in a shrill, shrieky tone and intermittently get louder and softer and occasionally even yowls like a dying cat.
So I’ll say it publicly, you all were right and I was wrong. Less than 24 hours in and the tree has already paid for itself in fun. Today we got out the glitter, glue, and construction paper and made a few ornaments. I have a few other alternative ornament ideas up my sleeve that we may try in the next few days and I’m planning a trip to LuLu’s to see if I can find any other funny ornaments. I’m really hoping for some lost in translation version of “Merry Christmas.”
