The tree

Our tree is up early this year (see a couple posts down about shoehorning it in). In past years it went up on the 24th, with a couple of boxes of ornaments intentionally left out for guests to help with dressing it. Yes, you come to our place, you get put to work.

This year, in addition to the stress of actually fitting it into the living room (for a brief demented moment I considered putting the coffee table in storage and putting the tree in its place. We would have spent the entire holidays sitting around staring at a tree & unable to see each other sitting on the chairs and couch opposite. A bit of a conversation stopper to bellow through a mass of greenery……..), there was the stress of not actually knowing exactly where the tree was.

Well, I didn’t know where the tree was.

Roo did know. It was in the storage locker. And as he had begun packing the storage locker in early August, and the tree was one of the first things to go in it, it was in the back of the storage locker. Way back.

So in the interests of preserving our sanity, and not sure if the services of tunnelling experts and mining engineers might be required to dig the tree and decorations out, Roo pulled it out last Saturday, and once he triumphantly arrived with it, he and the kids decorated it, an entire week before Christmas Eve.

I was dispatched to shop. Even though we only buy presents for the children, we do actually have to buy them. In the past years, I have successfully accomplished this by ordering pretty much everything online in early November, but this year, let’s say things have been a bit out of sorts, and so I was shopping while they decorated.

And it’s probably a good thing, because I’m not sure we wouldn’t have all tried to stab each other with the crystal icicles, had I been there. Amelia, aged now 11, is channelling Martha Stewart with a vengeance.

Now if you’re a woman and living in North America, you can’t tell me that you haven’t been influenced by Martha. It’s just not possible. It’s like dioxins in the water, you can’t see it, you may not be aware of it, but it’s getting to you. And Martha and I did have a fling. It didn’t last because I generally hate crafty things. The cooking and the recipes are what sucked me in, and looking at the clean elegant lines of a nice comfortable home, filled with nicely proportioned furniture and good woodwork.

But life with two small children brought its own realities and compromises. There is no way to make a big toddler ride-on car look good in your living room, even if the focal point is an 1860 Austrian pine schrank. And the reality is that I enjoy cooking only when I don’t actually have to do it. So even the recipes and cookbooks languish, and the subscription to the magazine expired many years ago.

And while I have matured, and learned to enjoy tolerate these years of various plastic pieces of toys scattered through our home, accented by discarded socks (because their feet get hot so suddenly they simply must yank their socks off and throw them somewhere, otherwise, they might catch on fire), Amelia is firming up her decorating backbone.

I used to say things like “Oh lord, not those decorations! Let’s skip them, they’re such tacky crap!” but when I realized how much my kids liked them, I handed over the box to a child and said “go for it” (then, late at night, I re-arranged the ornaments so the ugly ones were out of site of adults…). I’ve mellowed. Now, I expect the tree to look like a mongrel.

But not Amelia. Amelia is now the decorating fanatic. And when Hugo was decorating the tree, with every cheesy, tacky ornament, and hanging them randomly, instead of pausing to step back and survey the effect, sparks flew from Amelia’s eyes, flames shot from her head and the voice of Martha screeched “NOT THERE!!! That’s hideous! What are you doing??!!!???”

It’s eerie to see myself in an 11 year old. And strange to be advising her to chill a bit and not make such a fuss, when not even 10 years ago, that was me.

Dear Amelia – thank you for making sure the tree looks nice. And thank you for teaching me, that it doesn’t matter. One day, you’ll know it too.