Kirsten's Desk

katydidsays replied to your photo: Current status.

pretty! i’m debating putting mine up this year. this makes me want to!

Thank you! I do recommend it, primarily because it’s something you do with a glass of wine in one hand and the ornaments in the other. (Okay, maybe put down the wine once in a while.)

Let me give you a little backstory on that tree, though…

We’re on a three-year rotation for Christmas - one year out east with The Husband’s people, one year at my Mom’s, and one year at our place. Which means we don’t put a tree up every year, and haven’t really invested in a lot of Christmas decoration. The one you see here is artificial, and it used to be my Mom’s. She wanted to get rid of it, and it seemed like a good solution for us.

This tree has been packed since January 2009, so I was a little concerned about the state of the light strands. We put the tree up last weekend, and I plugged it in… and only the top half lit up. That meant there were hours of bulb-checking in our future. Fuck.

Yesterday I finally sat down to go through the strands, bulb by bulb. I was onto strand two when it hit me: I’d only found one plug when I set it up, but wasn’t there two last time we had it out? So I felt around the bottom, and there they were - two prongs in need of a connect to an electrical charge. One extension cord later, and the tree was lit. (For the record, there were three dead bulbs, but they were easy to find once the whole thing lit up.)

So the decorations went on, blah blah, and now it’s festive in here. All good, right? Not really. Because the last time this was up we were still living in a condo, and I realized that the decor that fit that place doesn’t really work in a house. 

When January hits and everything goes on sale, I’m going mad shopping. And we’ve got a few years to collect, since we’ll be out east again next year and somewhere else the year after that. When we decorate this house again in three years, it’ll look a bit better.

And I think we’ll go back to a real tree. They smell nice.