BC Parent December 1999
Holiday Decor
I set the artificial, tinseled, tabletop Christmas tree on the dining room table today. Half thrown beside a ceramic pumpkin, it is the first inkling of Christmas to sneak out of the attic. It’s the first week of December, and once again the aura of the season finds me precariously perched behind the eight ball. If I had started running yesterday I wouldn’t have been able to catch up with the wave of festivity hitting the world outside my window.
Every year the race gets tighter — as I try pushing Christmas toward Valentine’s Day, the world tries shoving it back to Halloween – it’s a no win situation. Stores haul out the garland as soon as they mark down the candy kisses. As I march moldy pumpkins to the curb, my neighbors begin to hang their Christmas lights. I can’t keep up.
One year, when the kids were small, we put our tree up on the first of December. With six ornaments in our Christmas collection, we decorated it with strung popcorn, stuffed toys and paper chains – it was lovely. Our children, the oldest being four, took great pride in the fact they had decorated the tree themselves; all ornaments front and centre. The tree tipped over repeatedly. We resorted to tying the top of it to the curtain rod over the living room window where it dangled until all its needles fell off. The experience was catastrophic – we have never purchased our tree prior to the 15th again.
Recently I have been lobbying to buy a pre-decorated pine, pre-wired and plastic, it could be stored in a green garbage bag and retrieved from the attic year after year. The suggestion has fallen on deaf ears. The children, now teens, have visions of Martha Stewart as they pull the varied collection of Christmas finery from the dusty corners above the garage.
In the last few years the colored bulbs in the outdoor lights have been switched from ‘multi’ to red, then green and back to red again – all at the whim of the decorator of the year. The stuffed toys which decorated our original trees have been replaced by exotic collections of ceramic and wooden decorations. Our stash of Christmas decor has grown over the Boxing Day clearance sales, we now have a variety of things musical, lighted and tinseled. It takes four days to decorate the house and a month to put it all away.
There was a time when the family decorated together, children were bursting with excitement and the anticipation of Santa coming was more than we could stand. These days we are hard pressed to sit down to a meal together. Christmas looms and the major task facing me this year is the daunting question of whether or not the ceramic pumpkin will get put away before the guy in the red suit makes his appearance.