Christmas Decorating 2015

Last Saturday Rob and I put up our Christmas tree. As we “labored” (as Rob likes to say) we drank hot apple cider out of some festive Spode mugs. The mugs were my favorite part of the day; they have handles that look like candy canes.

Our tree is a rather low-quality artificial one that we bought back in the ‘90s. Every year it loses tons of needles, so at this point we have to work hard to make it look it good. To cover up all the bare spots, we load it up with yards of silver garland and boxes and boxes of dorky ornaments. The tree’s pretty short and small, but it takes all day to decorate.

Of course the cats got involved in the decorating, as they do every year. June, who thinks everything’s her business, dug in a box of tissue-paper-wrapped ornaments. Then she settled down and made a bed in it. Buntin thought this was a brilliant idea so when June got distracted and started chasing the garland I was hanging, she stole her spot in the box. I kept accusing Buntin of crushing ornaments. Buntin is “solid,” as Rob so kindly puts it.

Every time we unwrapped an ornament, we’d set the tissue paper in a pile on Rob’s chair. Eventually Softee curled up and went to sleep on the pile, so we just put our tissue paper on top of her. By the end of the night, she was covered in tissue paper and only her little head was poking out of her messy, cozy tissue-paper nest.

We hung ornaments for hours, though we did take a few breaks to eat hot apple pie and Christmas candy. We finally finished decorating about 10 o’clock, and in the end our tree looked just like it does every year—kind of good but kind of funny. Buntin and June were asleep underneath it, worn out from all their “helping.” They were cooing and softly sighing and shedding all over the tree skirt.