A Christmas tree should be a joyous jumble of handmade ornaments, crude garlands, and twinkling lights.
What is should not be: an accessory. It should not be tricked out to match your couch or your carpet or your paint color. It shouldn’t be tastefully, blandly monochromatic. And it shouldn’t look like it belongs on the floor of your local Pottery Barn or Joann Fabrics. When my parents split, my mom left behind the handmade ornaments our family had made and accumulated over the years. Instead of ornaments made out of glitter and a green metal ashtray from McDonalds (remember those?), we had a fake flocked tree adorned with blue plaid bows and little white seagulls perched in wooden napkin rings. Color me Ebenezer, but this didn’t exactly read Christmas to me. It screamed “aisle 4 in Michaels Crafts,” not a place where I wanted to spend much time during the holidays, for fear of stabbing my eyes out with florist’s wire.
Please pull out all of your ornaments—the wonky handmade ones, the corny gifts, the big-ass, almost-to-scale Santa you bought on an ill-advised trip to a Christmas Shoppe—and lather up your tree the way God and the Von Trapp family intended.
(photo: barefootfloor.com)
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2 comments:
So true! For the first time in 11 years, there's a real tree in my home, even if it's only 3 feet tall. After hauling the artificial 7-footer to Goodwill, I started the arduous (arborous?) task of reducing three storage totes full of accumulated ornaments down to what would fit on my downsized Charlie Brown version. Survivors of the purging include a few handmade childhood relics (those little "people" made of felt scraps glued to empty toilet-paper tubes), special ornaments given to me by friends and family over the years, and some colorful old-fashioned candy canes that I'm sure are fossilized by now. It's wonderful (if not perfectly straight and round from the factory), and my apartment smells like childhood memories, not plastic and steel. Pottery Barn, eat your heart out. I'm putting the Christmas records on the turntable and heading to the kitchen to bake some Christmas cookies. From scratch.
Amen sister!
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