decking the overheated christmas tree

hot little white christmas tree
Sunday was the annual trimming of the tree at Ma's place, but due to general exhaustion, overheating and spending eleven hours asleep on Monday night, this is the first chance I've had to blog about it.

Due to the fact that it was going to be a hot day, I made sure that I had my crap together early... and given that it was already 27°C at 7am, I was already heading out the door.

And after enjoying my very icy Iced Coffee (I wrapped it in two of those blue gel icepacks for the drive down and they were so cold they actually froze little bits of the coffee... so fucking nice), I got to work putting up the tree.

No really major earth shattering revelations there.

Although I always enjoy finding the messages from myself, and adding to them when appropriate. It's also a pretty damn accurate indication of my mood the previous year.

We did have something of a revelation when it came time to put the lights on though... partly because the tree spins. Not all of it, but the all-in-one top piece rotates, as does the section with the next three levels on it... so instead of walking around and around and around the tree, I actually spun the damn tree and let the lights find their own level.

Okay, it was slightly more complex than that, but it kinda worked. And I went with a very rough "thread the lights around the end of each branch" approach which seemed to work pretty well, although there was some additional threading of the string around the tree at the end that may be complicated to undo.

We'd been debating what colour scheme to go with this year after last year's little rainbow tree, and we were going to start with either just red or red and silver this year, but wouldn't you know it, it turns out we have like one box of silver baubles, so it looked pretty damn lame... and red on it's own was more sparse than I would have liked.

So we added the green, of which we have a large number... but it was still missing something, so we added in the golds.

decked out in red, green and goldmaking some artistic lego gifts
You know what, for somebody who thought that white trees were just plain tacky for years and years and years and years, I'm kind of annoyed with myself that we didn't go over to "the light side" forever ago. It's a much better tree for Ma's house, and the fact that the lights make the whole tree glow (which I'm sure I will find some way to say every single Christmas) makes the whole tree so beautiful when it's finished.

My only small complaint is that it wasn't a particularly expensive tree since Ma was just testing the idea of a white tree... so it could be better quality.

Once we were happy with the tree, we did some reorganising of other Christmas stuff that we don't need and started to put together a bunch of stuff to donate or otherwise get rid of.

And all this while working with no air-conditioning with general overheated ennui continuing from Saturday.

We then had some lunch and started on the wrapping presents.

And can I just say, not really our best work to date.

Although I was very pleased with the two Lego minifig frames I put together for junior members of the extended family. It's the same idea as the Spaceman frames I put together last year but made with figures from the Castle range and (admittedly very good, but still) knockoff superhero figures.

The fun part was realising that I had four characters who are about to face off against each other in their respective movies (Iron Man vs Captain America and Superman vs Batman), so that made the organisation of the characters easy. And I'm pretty sure there have been more than a few Hulk vs Spidey stories in the comics.

We also put together the baskets we always arrange for Princess T and Miss Oh... again, not necessarily the best versions of those, but they will only see them for about 10 seconds before they start opening them, so it's all good.

Then there was some additional organisation of other stuff in the wrapping department that we don't use and is just taking up space... then we called it a day.

But that meant that I was still driving home in 39°C plus weather.

So while it wasn't the worst day for putting up the tree (incredibly sleep deprived and last year's ear infection rank pretty highly), it's done and it looks pretty.

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