We all know that the year sucked. But we’re desperately trying to keep some sense of normalcy in our Christmas decorating – primarily because it’s a last ditch attempt to submit to the horror and ennui.
Today was the day we put up the tree. I tried to play with the process a bit in some Facebook posts.
The first thing I noticed is that it seemed much shorter than in previous years. First troubleshooting step is to assume operator error!
Taller now, but seems to be strangely darker and less festive than nominal…
Very much better, complete with white lights, colored lights, bubble lights, and the most eclectic mix of ornaments covering nearly forty years that you’ve ever seen. No “theme” here (I remember a year as a child when my mother went nuts on a theme and got a white flocked tree, no green at all, and then put red spherical ornaments all over – it was very Malaria Trump-ish) other than the theme of “This Is The Willett Family History.”
One new ornament that I just got (after seeing a pilot/JPL acquaintance on Twitter get one and show it off):
Finally, this year we got the tree set up properly in the middle of the living room show window that looks out onto the front yard and street.
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 
Sorry, I can offer you an eclectic mix of ornaments from over seventy years – some were on the tree before I was born!
But yours looks lovely! Well done 🙂
I’m on tinsel hanging today. Can you tell me why tinsel is illegal in the USA? I read that somewhere, but I can’t find it again.
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I didn’t know tinsel was illegal! Haven’t seen it in years, but never used it as an adult. We had TONS of it when I was a kid!
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A quick search (you got me curious) and I can’t see that it’s illegal. It’s unpopular, possibly because today’s is plastic instead of metallic based, but the metallic kind contained lead, so that got banned in 1972. The plastic kind looks different and some folks think it’s a pollutant, but it’s still out there. Amazon has it, plus tons of colored tinsel garlands, which we *DO* use. When the kids were small we had years of “garland mania” where we put them on EVERYTHING. In later years at the old house where we had to run power cords from the house out to the trees by the street we would wrap the cords in garlands to “camouflage” them.
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Ah, that explains it. I think the question was asked in a quiz, which means that soemone was using a quiz book from the 80s, probably!
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