Here's to all the scrappy trees

What’s your festive tree status? Real or artificial? Elegant decorations or rustic? Early decorator or last-minute? Christmas tree or Hannukah bush or just-leave-you-alone-it’s-not-your-thing hedge?

I was a Christmas tree fundamentalist as a kid. Real tree, massive, symmetrical. A prescribed order of decorations: first lights, then garland, then ornaments, then tinsel. Nearly all the ornaments were fragile balls painted in metallic colours and some fancier ones dipped in some kind of glitter. We had teardrop-shaped ones that had to go on the high branches. The last thing was to coat the tree entirely in tinsel—we called it icicles—but don’t dare slap them on. You had to hang the tinsel strand by static-clinging strand.

I believed our family was special because we used the same wrapping paper as Santa Claus.

Merry Christmas! Here’s a free post from last year.

Caroling, now we go