My tree: let me show you it.

[resonant]

tofty put up photos of her tree, and I thought: I have a digital camera! I could do that!





The kidlet put it up mostly, so the lights aren't shoved to the inside the way I like them, but, hey! I didn't have to put up the tree. I thought the kitten would be poking his head out at eye level by now, but so far all he's done is knock the lower ornaments off. You can see a bit of the tree skirt I made ten years ago, which I'm very proud of; it's two different plaid flannels, reversible, and I put it together without a pattern. And then the year the kidlet was born, I packed it away in some totally random place and didn't find it again until last year. (I lost an early-model digital camera and my favorite black shoes the same way. I had some kind of packrat thing going on postpartum; I don't get it.)



My crescent-moon topper. Three things I really like on a tree: birds, moons, and cats.



The Tech Goddess got me the Data ornament. She knows me well.

To the left is a brown-paper thing you can't really see very well, but it's probably the funniest ornament on the entire tree. The kidlet made it for the cat when they were about four, and so it's a dead mouse; it's lying on its back, it has little X's for eyes. And they weren't sure the cat would be able to tell the mouse was dead, see, so they very helpfully wrote DED on the back of it.



We have a few of these, left over from the spouse's childhood. We grew up in the late sixties and early seventies, the Years of the Pastel Christmas. These reindeer are covered with glitter and they look edible.



I'm a repository for family ornaments. This winter one of my aunts downsized her tree and sent me an entire box of cat ornaments. This is my favorite.



My former English teacher and next-door neighbor used to give us a literature-themed painted wooden ornament every year, and my parents passed them all on to me a couple of years ago. Here's Bottom; we've also got Alice and Tiny Tim and Mary Poppins.



My favorite aunt gave me a box of ornaments before she died, including a string of lights with these little cherubs attached; the lights poked in between the wings in back. Obviously tree lights from the fifties aren't very safe, but I did manage to salvage a few of the cherubs, though I can't get them to stay on any of our lights.



There's no story behind the mouse musicians. I ordered them from a catalog. But I love them so.

So! Now you! Show me your tree!

edited 2020 to retroactively correct the kidlet's gender pronouns

Comments

[tofty.livejournal.com]

I LOVE YOUR DED MOUSE. And your Data, and your overcoat-clad cat, and your moon, and everything else too. I'm so glad you did this!

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I'm glad I stole the idea from you. I like seeing pictures of people's stuff.

[copracat]

Your tree is a very beautiful collection of family and friends.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Nearly everything on it reminds me of someone or something.

[evilprettykitty.livejournal.com]

Every year since I was like 4 my mother has giving my sister and (and now her fiance) two hallmark ornaments that are about us and so we know the year. Then when we go off on our own, we take them with. I love it.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

What a nice idea! This is the sort of thing, though, that I consider it and then say, "But the kidlet is eight already! It's too late to do it properlly, so I won't do it at all!"

[evilprettykitty.livejournal.com]

I don't think it is too late! I mean her fiance was 30 went he came into our family!

[coreopsis.livejournal.com]

Awesome tree. My favorite, aside from the ded mouse of course, is the cat. He's so dapper in his little suit and coat. :)

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

He's adorable, isn't he? His arms bend, but I like them in the position they came in: looking like he's waiting for his waltz partner to show up.

[springwoof.livejournal.com]

now, that's the kind of Christmas tree I like best. the kind that has family ornaments with stories behind them.... so cool!

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I see theme trees in magazines -- nothing but gingerbread cookies and red ribbons, nothing but teal and purple -- and in the abstract they look OK to me, like if I had to decorate a tree at an office or something I'd probably do something like that, but to me, the home tree isn't so much an item of home decor as a sort of scrapbook.

[springwoof.livejournal.com]

exactly!

a "themed" tree without memories behind it...man, it looks so cold, so lonely--like you said, great for a public space where aesthetics would be the prime consideration, but so, so sad and lonesome for home....

[springwoof.livejournal.com]

oh, and btw, my tale of woe: I have decorations! with history! but, alas, in boxes all neatly put away. because my Spouse is a Grinch, hates Christmas, and won't let me put up a tree without a Huge Fight...and I'm lacking the energy to put into the fight this year...
/sad

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Oh no! That's terrible! Shame on him. Threaten to put Prozac in his stocking.

I used to think the spouse was a grinch, but it turned out that what he hated was the process of going and buying the tree in the cold, and dragging it home and getting it all fixed in the stand and everything (never mind that I did most of that) -- now that we have a fake one, I have to stop him from putting it up the weekend before Thanksgiving.

[laurelwood.livejournal.com]

That is the finest tree topper I've ever seen, and I'm covetous of just about every ornament you pictured. These tree posts are the best; I was raised with the eclectic style of tree decorating, so I really love to see other trees like mine and hear the stories about how/why different ornaments were acquired.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Somehow it seems appropriate that you and I would share a lot of the same tree-decorating taste!

I ordered my moon from a catalog the first year I spent Christmas in my own apartment, which was the Year of the Great Plague when I and all the twentysomethings in my office all had this horrible virus for weeks and weeks and weeks, but because we were twentysomethings we went on coming to work, because the newspaper had to come out, right? So I went down to the tree lot with my roommate, Lisa, in her wicked-cool black Jeep, and we put up this little three-foot tree and stuck the moon on top of it and then we both took some NyQuil and went to bed, and that's all the decorating that got done that year.

[cranberryink.livejournal.com]

DATA OMG. Waaaaaaant! That's so awesome!

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I looked him up, and he's ten years old -- it really doesn't seem like it was that long ago. You can find them on eBay.

I need to find a way to get all the geek/brain/exposition-machine characters on my tree -- I'll bet I could find a Hermione ornament pretty easily, but if I wanted Rodney McKay, Daniel Jackson, Benton Fraser, and Blair Sandburg, I'd probably have to make my own.

(If some craftily-skilled person wanted to do that, they'd probably make some good money off of fandom.)