4 December 2005
O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree,Meg says: There's been some heated debate in these parts recently about Christmas trees and, more specifically, the erection and adornment thereof. It's a merry minefield, I tell you.
You give us so much pleasure!
How oft at Christmas tide the sight,
O green fir tree, gives us delight!
O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree,
You give us so much pleasure!
Let us deal with these issues one at a time.
First, what sort of tree should I get? Within that issue, there are two sub-topics to be tackled: constitution and size. How real should a tree be? And does size matter?
The first of these is a tough one. One one hand, fake trees tend toward the tacky, need to be stored somewhere for the other 11+ months of the year, and have a tendency to look like coathangers covered in the kind of fake plastic grass that greengrocers and fishmongers often use to display their produce. This is especially true of the cheaper end of the fake tree scale.
You may be able to get something more realistic for more money, though be aware that cash seldom buys taste, and your extra pennies may instead go towards inbuilt illuminations or fibreoptics, both of which are wrong on so many levels, I can't begin to go into it.
On the other hand, real trees never ever look as christmas-tree-shaped as they ought. Rather than being the dainty downward-sloping isosceles triangle of popular myth, real trees tend instead to have
a) fat bottoms
b) upward-spiking spindly branches and
c) a really long tall bit at the top
People who prefer fake trees often base this bias on the fact that plastic things don't drop needles on the carpet which stick around until sometime in august. True. But real trees, pointy needles and all, do however smell better than a fake, especially one which has been stuffed in the cupboard under the stairs for the best part of the year. Mmm, mothballs.
Size matters, when it comes to bringing trees inside your home. As well as the common sense advice (nothing taller than the room it's going to live (or rather, die slowly) in; remove the extensive root system; ensure it doesn't have any birds nesting in it, etc), the rule of thumb I like to trot out at this time of year is as follows:
About one foot of tree for each person who will be enjoying it on a daily basis, and then a bit more, for, er, the baby Jesus or something, up to a maximum height of the ceiling, or the stratosphere, or the structural strength of nature, whichever comes first.Hence, a couple might choose something cute in the 2-3' scale, wheras a family of four might prefer something a little bigger. The tree in an office building lobby needs to be fairly substantial, in order to please the many residents of its building, and the tree in Trafalgar Square is, by necessity, massive, because it's on a major thoroughfare. Simple.
Once you've identified which tree type is for you, there's the thorny (or rather, spiky) issue of when you put the damned thing up. There are two main schools of thought about this, if you don't follow the behaviour of those harridans of the high street, Messers Marks, Spencer, Lewis and, er, BHS.
Some say that you should pop out to your local tree emporium (no, not the forest) and acquire your fir towards the beginning of December, in order to get full mileage out of the festive fronds. Others maintain that the tree shouldn't be erected until a couple of days before Christmas itself, in line with tradition, which indicates that the tree should be put up on Christmas Eve and taken down on the 6th of January. But since when has something silly like tradition ever prevented us from doing whatever the hell we please? So, many settle for the middle ground - whenever they get around to it during the month of December. Failing that, the straggly last one left in the seasonal tree extravaganza which opens up for a few weeks in the car park of the local pub, will have to do.
Decorations are complicated, and can be the cause of many a relationship breakdown. Your two basic options are dressed down (usually one predominant colour; the less-is-more approach) and dressed up (everything in that dusty box which lives in the attic, plus everything else you bought this year; the more-is-more approach).
The former approach tends to include classy (read: expensive/weird) items such as white cashmere knitted fluffy snowball baubles, strings of stars made from galvanised steel, miniature mirror-balls and items intricately made from dried/frosted fruit.
The latter approach usually involves every decorative item which your family has been hoarding for decades, including
a) extremely fragile baubles from 1973 when making things out of incredibly thin glass to hang precariously in dangerous places where children might be rushing around in sugar-induced hyperactivity seemed like a fabulous idea
b) strings of threadbare tinsel which, despite costing only 39p in most modern outlets, you haven't quite yet thrown away
c) bushy newer tinsel in such quantities that once the tree is wrapped in it, you won't be able to actually tell what's underneath anyway, so you might as well have wrapped your glittery boas around a guitar, or a standard lamp, or one of your relatives
d) handmade crap from schools long-since left, sometimes involving painted pastry
The secret is to plump for either of the perfectly acceptable approaches outlined above, but not both. Tasteful mixed with tacky, tatty or traditional will simply not work.
So, you've got the right tree, on the right date, and decorated it in the roght way. So far so good. But the worst quandry of all is yet to come.
They say you're never fully dressed without a smile, but seasonally-speaking, your tree, you see, isn't properly dressed without something on the top.
Your topping-off choices are typically:
1. An angel
2. A fairy
3. A star
It can be difficult to tell the difference between a fairy and an angel (unless you want to talk theology): both have wings, both tend to be female, both have nice frocks (generally). They are, however, differently-accessorised according to the requirements of their particular profession. Angels have halos, while fairys wave wands.
Stars clearly look nothing like either of the above, and are a typical choice for the more religious tree-dresser; the sign of the star signifying, of course, the biblical fact that Mary found out she was up the duff from reading her horoscope.
Whatever you choose to place at the pinnicle of your pine, and however you choose to decorate the remainder of your foliage, always bear in mind these three simple rules of tree decoration:
1. Don't put all the decorations at the front, because it will become unstable(r) and topple over, crushing granny
2. Tie ornaments on with loops of green thread rather than their proper hangy things. This means that when it comes to undressing (ooer) in the New Year, you can simply snip the loops to free each item, rather than having to wrestle with needles and fiddly little metal loops which don't want to come undone, etc.
3. Never, ever, under ANY circumstances, place ornaments on your tree which contain catnip. This goes double if you actually own a cat.
Manage those, and you should be fine.
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