Reading: Anne of the Island

Moving: sit-ups

Watching: Elegant, eloquent concession and a lot of nyah-nyah boo-boo

13 December 2000: Shrub and Fir

Sigh.

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RDC was exhausted and slept until almost 10 on Sunday. I was awake at 6:30 and up shortly thereafter, freak that I am. I did some situps, read my email, wrote Christmas cards, swept the floor, unpacked, and maybe read some. In the afternoon we set out to find a tree. RDC had heard that Home Despot had good ones, and fresh, for cheap, but they were out. We ate lunch and bought some groceries at Alfalfa's, then popped across the street to King Soooper's for other, stupid groceries, where I forgot toothpaste and horrified RDC by declaring I was going to make my snowrocks with shortening, since that's what CLH does and hers work. Also somehow a string of lights is gone and I had to pop into Target, except there's no popping into Target on a weekend in December, and RDC stayed in the car to stew and fret about wasting time. All he wanted was a tree.

And a tree we found.

The first lot we looked through was super expensive plus we didn't like any of their trees. The next lot looked more reasonable but we still didn't like any of the trees. When the man realized we were leaving, he obviously didn't want us to. We told him what we wanted, and as he pointed to specimen after specimen, told him why we didn't want what he was pointing at: that the trees out were either too short or too tall, too narrow or too perfectly cone-shaped and thus impermeable to ornaments, or too skimpy, or were Scotch pines (too long-needled) or that kind of spruce whose name I forget with the really prickly needles. And anything that he took out of a net from the stack at the back wouldn't relax into shape enough to judge. We know what we like, damn it.

We waited enough for him to take one tree out of its netting. That very first one was It. He banged its stump on the ground to snap its branches into an approximation of shape, and we saw that the shape was promising and that its needles held on. I wanted to drop my keys next to it to gauge its startlement reaction but decided that performing a puppy personality test on a Christmas tree would amuse only me and detract from that aura of Subaru-driving, REI-outfitted DINKs we exuded that made the man want our business. It was a Douglas fir, which was enough. The man named a price less than that for other trees of the same height on the lot--is Douglas fir a less desirable species?--and we paid it and hightailed it out of there.

This tree is my first Douglas fir. I've wanted one since reading The Luckiest Girl, because until she went to California, Shelley Latham thought that unless a tree was a Douglas fir, it wasn't a Christmas tree. We set it up, decided the bend in the upper spire was charming and not needing correction, and gave it a lot of water.

Then I got to play with my ornaments. And all my Christmas shtuff. Some went on the mantel.

Christmas mantel

 

A few years ago I found some alphabet blocks and painted N O E L and P E A C E, except that I need another E. Then the wreath I made last weekend, and two Christmas tree candles I'll never burn, and a porcelain Christmas tree my grandmother glazed, and yea! the spotted elephant in the Rudolph collection I did find, and the Grinch's dog Max with his antler, and a Hummel figuring DMB gave us, and another tchotchke I made last weekend, and a Santa DMB also gave us, and a sleigh my grandmother painted, and the Little Drummer Boy sled leaning against the wall, and Rudolph, and Charlie-in-the-Box. The last doesn't look anything like he does in the television show, and I should know--I wouldn't've chosen to paint a box pink if I weren't aiming for textual accuracy.

I did the tree first, of course. The mantel's not as good, so I disposed of writing that first.

First I strung lights. CLH and I grew up with big, colored lights, blue green and red, and at some point we rebelled and opted for wee, white lights. I will never have bubblers. I do not want them. They are Wrong.

Many things Other People do are Wrong when it comes to Christmas trees.

First, artificiality. I refuse to believe that plastic is more environmentally sound than a young tree that has produced proportionally more oxygen in its seven-to-ten years than an adult tree does in the same period, or that throwing out a yicky artificial tree is superior to ensuring your organic tree gets turned into mulch (as happens in Denver). Furthermore, artificial trees are ugly. Ugly ugly ugly. And have I mentioned Wrong?

Secondly, a coordinated, matching, Done tree. People who decorate their trees in one color chosen to match the furniture or the fashion trend of the year (I've seen animal print ornaments this year, no lie) are Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Badness there abounds. Plus such a tree looks like it belongs in a bank lobby, where all the ornaments all match because they all came from a corporate bulk buy and have no personality or meaning.

Those are only two major transgressions, actually. There is a lot more that can be Right with a tree.

A tree should be real. It should speak to you. Ideally, a pet should spaz when it's brought into the house. There should be a wide variety of ornaments. Some should be beautiful, some fragile, all personal, some with gobs of glue and glitter that a child brought home from school (or that you made with gobs and glitter two weeks ago). There should be some new ornaments every year. Those fake gold McDonald-style ornaments your well-meaning father gave you should be hung too, but on the back of the tree. There should be a back of the tree. I am not prepared to allow a free-standing, middle of the room tree. It should have a topper, and there my own tree has its perfection-flaw. I have not yet found a topper I love. I want a good star. In 1994 RRP lent us a starfish she found in a Saybrook tidepool, but we haven't had one since. No angels (for me). Your tree should be yours, which, I'm prepared to concede--since concession is the theme of the day--might mean not following some of my Rightnesses--though I do not allow either of the major Wrongnesses.

So it began.

I tucked the lights deep into the foliage so the tree would wink as you walked around it. There's a line in a civil war movie when two men watch a Confederate camp at night from a nearby hilltop. One says "The campfires are blinking," and the other asks what that means. It means men are walking around talking; it means something big is in the offing. That's what I wanted my tree to look like. Or like a skyful of twinkling stars. Whichever.

This is the first time I have not had a piece of nonfloor furniture to unpack all my ornaments onto, from which to admire them all in a group before hanging. But admiring is necessary to the process, so onto the floor they went. CLH and I love organizing. After she unpacked all her boxes of crafts and supplies to her satisfaction last weekend, so that everything was easily accessible, she looked around her kingdom in satisfaction and declared, "Okay. Now we've looked at it all. Time to put it back." We both did the same thing with our blocks and Legos and Fisher-Price house, castle, school and bus and Weeble-Wobble yacht and camper: build ornate, complicated civilizations, and then not move the people within the structure because everything was perfect and needed to be looked at and perhaps perfected, but by no means disturbed or played with in some capricious, messy way. I have no idea why we're like that.

I unpacked all the nonfragile or less fragile bits, the cardinal in a nest a neighbor made, the crocheted mail box saying "Noël" that my great-grandmother made, the plastic, by golly, sphere my grandmother painted with a winter scene--all three gifts from childhood--the bits I made last weekend, the fly-fisherman I bought for RDC in Aspen in 1995, the little painted wooden ones I bought at Builder's Square in 1996, the gaudy, delicate pink and gold one that my mother gave me two years ago warning me how expensive it was (also fated for the back of the tree). With the box of nonfragile ones emptied, I could unpack the box of fragile ones into it looking for my favorite.

RDC hung his flyfisherman and the red sphere with a Steal Your Face on it he bought at Further in 1997, but he didn't want to hang any more until I hung one. I was rootling, looking, and happily extracted my favorite favorite, a large mostly-sphere shaped into a smiling sun on one side and a sleepy crescent moon on the other, an extravagant treat to myself in 1996. With those first special ones on, the decorating began in earnest.

clh's beautiful treemy beautiful treeTruth be told, I decorated CLH's tree. From the floor, she watched "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and strung ornaments on hooks and handed them to me. I decided where on the tree each ornament should go. I did most of ours, too. RDC decided he wasn't good at it and wandered back to the report he was writing. I can't remember when CLH gave me two deep red bell-shaped ornaments. If they date from her tenure in Aspen, she was probably thinking of the Maroon Bells. I wondered about the hedgehog she gave me in what year I forget, but, hanging it, I realized she was thinking of my animal-totem. I hung William, hippopotamus mascot of the Met, that RDC gave me in 1998. I hung the orca I bought on Orcas Island in 1999 but wasn't able to hang that year, since we went to Florida.* I hung a little wooden teddy bear near it, in case it got hungry. I hung the three plaster ones my grandmother made the same year she painted the regular ornament with the winter scene as well as a foot-long wooden sled with the little drummer boy on it.

* Ask me why I hate traveling for Christmas: not the traveling but the not-having a tree. Or the unspeakably depressing prospect of having a tree through most of December but disassembling it before Christmas on the eve of departure. Bleah.

Except that they're different species, and that I clearly do need more lights and more ornaments and to paint my living room and furnish it, our trees look a lot alike. No suprise there.

Eventually, RDC collapsed downstairs in front of "60 Minutes," whose first two stories I happily missed to finish the tree. He asked, "Is it done?" I replied, "It might be done, but everything's not on it yet." But I don't think I went into overkill mode. I am going to need more ornaments. The tree doesn't look bare, but it's bigger than our previous ones. It only looks right with the lights on, instead of just looking happiest with the lights on. I bet it'd look even better in daylight, which that photograph isn't. I took the last of my wired ribbon and tossed it over the top for streamers twisting down the tree (to fill in space; otherwise it's too much like garland, which I don't do) and called it done--note the perfect lack of tinsel. Besides tinsel being ugly, tinseled trees can't be mulched.

Then I called CLH and left her a message: "My tree could beat up your tree and steal its lunch."

Today I got email from the blister:

I sent the following email to newly returned from France [Friend]. The Samaritans of Boston are glad to have this friend of the spinster return as the matron of her family destroys her emotional stability:

"oh and the bitch sibling in denver also leaves a charming message on my machine 'my tree beats your tree any day.' This from my younger, married, home-owning, pet-possessing sister, who even destroys the one joy in my life, my beautiful (already drying out) tree. Leave me *something* to cling to in my geriatric spinsterhood, will ya!"

Is it not my job as the younger sister to ruin her pleasure?

(We are both Blister. She is the spinster and I am the hag or matron. Or bitch sibling, whatever.)

And if I were any kind of photographer, I would photograph every single ornament and catalog its year of arrival, the giver if applicable (almost always my sister), and any personal significance. Oh yes.

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I used Shutterfly after the weddings and told everyone how to get to the pix. This morning at 10--noon in Connecticut, where he is--MCB emailed--before breakfast and two months after the fact, which are two reasons he amuses me so much--thanking me for the link. Chatting, he quoted Tigger at me and linked an article about the various neuroses of the denizens of the Hundred Acre Wood and I recommended The Pooh Perplex, which is a collection of satirical faux academic articles analyzing Pooh from different schools of thought, Freudian, Marxist, etc.

I told him the first time I read it I borrowed it from X, a lapsed friend of ours, and suggested,

"Perhaps you could too," then in a new paragraph, I commented, "I slay me."

He replied,

"AHA HA ha ha heh hehhh... =ahem="

And I marveled at the ability of simple ASCII to reflect the exact sound of his laugh, interrupted.

Which reminds me that when I was reshelving books yesterday, shuffling and thinking I really ought to buy and hang shelves sometime Real Soon Now, I came to Susanna Kaysen on the shelf but not Girl, Interrupted. I called Haitch in a panic but she told me she'd returned it, and I might have even asked after it to hasten its return because I am such a generous lender. But I found it on the favorites shelf next to my desk and am so glad I did. After the movie, which I refuse to see, I probably would have to replace it with the icky movie cover. Which is why I'm so glad I just found a pre-movie edition of The English Patient in a used bookstore.

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Jessie might ask why I watch television at all, to which I have no good answer, but I can tell you why I mute commercials. Just now I've had CNN on, listening to Gore's and Bush's speeches on the television in the other room and not muting, and this is what I just heard:

"As a stunt woman and the mother of two great kids, staying in shape is really important to me."

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Last modified 15 December 2000

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