oh christmas tree...

You have two choices here... you can read the whole story, or you can just look at the pretty tree.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I spent Sunday up at Ma's place, first assembling and then trimming the Christmas tree.

Ma and I have this tradition, usually the first weekend in December I go up to her place and we trim the tree, wrap some presents, that kind of thing. Mostly because it's too much of a job for just one person, and mostly because I think it gets both of us into the holiday spirit... or something along those lines anyway.

This is, I think, the third year we've had the new robust tree... up until that we'd had a tree Ma bought me for my first Christmas (the new tree is also technically mine, although I don't know that I necessarily will ever have it at my place), and by about 20 years old, it was starting to look very decrepit and had a serious lean to it. It was about 28 or 29 when we finally retired it, mostly because the lean was getting progressively worse every year.

The image on the right there is the Christmas tree box... I have this obsession with adding little notes to a lot of the boxes for our Christmas thing... mostly because we only do this once a year and when we discover either the correct way of doing things (as with the instruction on the top half of the tree box) or just a tip to make life easier (like the "do lites first!" comment on the bottom half), I like to record them for future Christmases. It all started with one instruction I wrote inside the lid of a box of tree lights...

Yup... that box...

It started with the "Togetherness" message... since we worked out it was easier to do the lights together and starting from the middle of the string at the top of the tree, each take a side and just wind the lights down the tree...

Kinda snowballed from there... in 2003 I added the rather appropriate comment of "FREEEEEEEEK!"...

Going back to the tree though...

Because the new tree is so much bigger than the old one, not to mention bushier and just generally more healthy looking, we keep finding we need more stuff to cover it properly, more lights, more tinsel, more baubles... and to that end, during the post Christmas sales last year Ma bought two new strings of lights... add that to one of the strings we already had, and we ended up with 135 lights on the tree... which sounds a lot more than it actually is. Unfortunately we must have bought slightly crappy lights because those very sharp plastic star cover things that they have kept either falling off or slipping down.

Anyway, after that it was on to baubles... I have this thing about only using solid colour balls... and only the shiny kind... none of that matt stuff. For years we had the oddest batch of shapes and colours and things with stripes and patterns and whatever... and the older I get, the simpler I actually want the tree (and also the more say I seem to get in it).

The way we used to do the baubles was that I would get them out of the boxes and add the little wire hanger things, then pass them to Ma and she would hang them, while I told her spots where she either needed to hang them or that were doubled up, or bare.

But she's not as young as she once was, so this year the torch was passed, and I deposited her in one of the loungechairs with a supply of baubles and little wire thingies, and I did the hanging. Because I wanted to take shots between each step (more on that in a minute), we did them in colour groups... Red, then gold, then green, then silver then blue then purple (and yes, I know purple isn't a traditional Christmas colour... but I'm gay and I like purple so ner!).

Original the plan with taking photos of the tree was to make a montage... then I decided that since I had the tripod with me (the light in Ma's living room is horrendous) I could set it up in one spot and just take pics at each stage, then maybe make an animated gif out of it... while that did work, Blogger doesn't seem to like animated gifs, at least not the way I tried to load it, plus the file was kind of huge... so I went back to the montage idea...

Also means I fulfill the (self imposed) requirements of Montage Monday...

Now if it was just me, I probably wouldn't even bother with tinsel... I kind of like the tree without it (of course I like the tree more than usual this year because I trimmed the whole damn thing)... but Ma loves her tinsel, so I let her go with it... which was amusing to watch in it's own right.

In the end though, I just said, look, we have all these lengths of tinsel... just grab this... lay it on the bottom row of branches... okay... now this one... about there... all the way around... good.... now this one.... now we grab this stuff with stars and go back and put it between the plain...

I had only really meant to work out how much tinsel we had, and whether we needed to get more to finish off the tree appropriately... and what do you know... it worked! Instead of the ten or so minutes of faffing about that Ma did to get the tinsel right on the pointy bit of the tree, it took us about two minutes to lay the rest of it. SCORE!

Suffice to say, I wrote the instructions for correct tinsel layage on the box we keep the tinsel in...

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