Christmas Tree Decorating Day is one of my favorite family traditions. When I was a kid it couldn't hold a candle to Rip Open The Presents day, but as I've gotten older I've come to appreciate the rest of the seasonal festivities for the passive-aggressive funfests they are.
One of the traditions I really like is the choice of food. The edibles on hand are not the typical Christmastime nosh. Nothing's ever that straightforward in our family, so on Christmas Tree Decorating Day you won't find us gobbling up turkey or feasting on figgy pudding. Instead our family tradition is to eat only hors d'oeuvres throughout the day. Platter after platter of spring rolls, meatballs, sun dried tomato thingies, and other single serving selections are brought out as the tree gets tarted up.
As you can see, there's even a tiny Dickens Village that's part of the decorating tradition. In the tiny Dickens Village, there are tiny ice skaters, tiny children playing in the snow, and tiny people singing tiny carols.
aside:
Historical accuracy falls apart upon closer inspection: the tiny skates aren't made out of the tiny bones of tiny dead horses, the tiny children don't receive only a tiny orange in their tiny Christmas stockings to stave off tiny scurvy, there is neither a tiny fog of coal dust nor a tiny outbreak of cholera, and the tiny women don't usually die in tiny painful childbirth. But the tiny Punch and Judy show is pretty funny.
end of aside
As for the Christmas tree itself, my family hangs up a lot of strange ornaments. Oh sure, there are also lots of plain red balls and mundane icicles adorning our tree each year, but the ornaments I like best are the cheesy ones: the homemade stuff my sister and I put together as kids, the bizarre ones bought on family trips, and the inexplainable blobs of plastic that get carefully boxed away after Christmas for their inevitable return.
I thought I'd share a few of my favorites ornaments with you, eager reader, so grab a mug of nog and read on if you dare.
Here are a pair of lovebirds. They look home made, but they're not. It takes factory precision to make fluffy, blind birds that rest below a warped coat hanger. I like to think of them as a monument to the old saying “In the land of the blind birds, the one-eyed bird is king even if he's made out of yarn.” Words to live by, my friends.
Ah, the famous Danglin' Pom Poms. These were fashioned by the hands of Young Carrington, Age 5-ish. They've adorned every Vanston family Christmas tree since then, but it's only now as I see them on my blog that it occurs to me there's a pretty obvious testicle reference that I'd never spotted before. I may have just ruined Christmas for myself.
There's a tradition in my family that when the Tiny Sweater ornament is hung on the tree somebody makes the joke that this is the sweater in which my baby sister was brought home from the hospital. Every. Single. Year. Because that joke never gets old. I made an attempt, circa 1985, to change it to a joke about this being the sweater in which baby Freddy Kruger was brought home from the hospital, but it never stood a chance against the inertia of the Tale of the Tiny Sweater.
A point of contention in the Vanston household at decorating time is the name of this ornament. My family refers to it as the Little Running Santa. But I think it's clear, and I believe you'll agree if you look without bias, that this is Little Purse-Snatching Santa.
It occurs to me that most of the ornaments have some sort of size-based preface, as in the Little Running Santa or the Tiny Sweater. But it's not as if anybody can hang Actual Anesthetized Mall Santas or Life-Sized Reindeer Heads on the tree. Not in my family, anyway. The spoilsports.
Whether it was my sister or myself who fashioned Stringy Santa Hoop Head is now lost to the annals of time, and yet it's a detail that is bitterly fought over every year. Better scholars than I have thrown up their hands and gone for a pint, so who can ever truly say who made this ornament? I'll tell you who: me! I'm the one who made Stringy Santa Hoop Head and don't let my sister tell you otherwise! Me me me, 100% all me all the time, not her, just me, stamped it locked it swallowed the golden key. So there.
One ornament I can't take credit for, thankfully, is this jester head. It's over 8 inches high, and that's a whole heck of a lot of ornament. I think of it as Big Ugly Jester Head, but it is technically unnamed because it is rarely spoken of aloud. It's the Lord Voldemort of ornaments. It is a reminder of why the most common rhymes for jester are fester, pester, sequester and polyester.
This would normally be an ornament I'd make fun of—because nothing says Christmas like an otter in a clamshell—but the fact that the otter is holding a bowling ball takes the whole thing to such a new level of absurdity that I'm actually impressed.
Santa in an outhouse. I have no response to that.
Ah, the infamous Shiny Pickle ornament. This is one of the Vanston household favorites, an ornament that gets commented upon and admired every single year when it is discovered among the other, lesser ornaments. It is written that the person who extracts the Shiny Pickle from the box of ornaments and holds it aloft will be crowned The Once and Future King of Tree Decorating and will be given sway over the land and all who live on it. It never works out that way, because the area immediately surrounding the Christmas tree was declared an anarcho-syndicalist commune in the mid 90s, but it's a nice idea.
Besides, supreme executive power cannot be derived from some fermented cucumber ceremony, especially not when a far more beautiful and treasured ornament is at hand: the One-Winged Halo-Stump Clothes Peg Angel.
The One-Winged Halo-Stump Clothes Peg Angel is my favorite ornament of them all. It's my desert island ornament, the one I'd pick if I had to decorate a whole (hopefully small) tree with only a single bauble.
It once had two golden heart shaped wings, but now it can only fly in circles. It once had a pipe cleaner halo, but now it has a stump-like antenna. Its expression has even begun to resemble a grimace over the years.
I made the One-Winged Halo-Stump Clothes Peg Angel myself when I was but a wee lad. In fact, making this ornament is one of my earliest memories. Of course it's probable that I am only remembering the story of making the ornament rather than the actual act, but I'll take what I can get.
And now that you have shared in the festive joy and hideous wonder of the Vanston family Christmas tree, you can feel a little better about your own family's strange branch-hangers. If anyone needs me, I'll be over by the pickle.
