This year is the first that I plan to buy a real, live Christmas tree. I am a little nervous about it, because I am not really sure how one goes about decorating it. All of those little branches just poke off in whatever direction Nature intended -- and I bet that Nature never gave any thought to how said branch would look with a shiny red glass ball swinging pendulously from it.
My childhood Christmas trees were always the kind that came in a box. Shame, really, since I grew up in Colorado where we keep all the pines when nobody is using them. Every year, about two or three weeks before Christmas, I would lug the box out from underneath the stairs, and then spend the next three to four hours painstakingly straightening out each faux-needle-wrapped wire branch. Then the tree would be assembled, and I would spend the next hour bending wires to and fro, as my mom spotted holes in the foliage that needed to be filled. My arms completely covered with scratches from all of the sharp pointy bits, I would then string the tree up with lights -- walking around and around with lights coiled over my shoulder. Usually I would not escape this part without a few choice scratches to my legs, too. Then everyone else would finally join in, hanging up balls, and scraps of paper ornaments made in pre-school, and little wooden soldiers bought on sale some January, and a glass ballerina I would always hang so that a blue light shone up through her glass tutu, as I felt she looked best in blue, and puffballs, and sequin-covered foam strawberries, and twenty-year-old candy canes with a felt slipcover designed to look like a horse, and Baby's First Christmas, and sometimes if I was very lucky, great swathes of gold foil garland.
After I went to college, my mom took to leaving all the boxes of what I considered the good stuff underneath the stairs. I would assemble the tree, and then on would go strings of white lights. Elegant pearl-white globes would be hung, and wire-edged golden ribbon would fall in elegant curliques. Meanwhile, the paper candle I had crayoned in and cut out when I was in the first grade sat in a box next to all the other ornaments normally tied up with bits of red yarn. Mom is still saving all of those for me, so I can put them up on my own tree someday.
But I do not think I am quite ready for that amazing jumble of knick-knacks and kitschery. I think that this year, for my first real tree, not to mention my first tree outside of my mom's house, I will take a page from the second half of her book. I think my tree will have white lights. It will have elegant curls of ribbon. Classy glass spheres, shiny little baubles. Because not only will that look very pretty for when my mom comes to visit next week -- I do not think I trust those "real" branches to hold the weight of all my memorable trinkets just yet.