Ornamentation

When we went to Home Depot yesterday I saw that they're already laying out the Christmas decorations. Perhaps they anticipate a really bad Christmas season and they're starting early, or perhaps it's normal to crowd out Thanksgiving with Christmas decor. This sort of thing used to bother me when I was younger, but looking back on it now, I can't really figure out what was so awful about it. What does it bother me if stores put up Christmas displays and play Christmas music even though Thanksgiving isn't even really in the planning stages yet?

But my, how the ornaments have changed. When I was a kid, it seemed that most of our familial ornaments were either clear glass bulbs with chipped stripes painted around their equators, or spiky, spiny Sputnik-looking deals that I think were made out of a primitive sort of chrome-plated plastic. The lights were immense. I don't keep track of light nomenclature so the Patio Men that know C7s from C5s will laugh at me. Suffice it to say that the lights were the size of large grapes and if you got a preponderance of the blue lights on one side of the tree, strange but appealing grotto effects could be produced.

The trees were always real, of course, at first lumpy, misshapen sad sacks that we cut off my grampa's mining claim, and later wretched things bought at the Christmas tree lot and brought home, complete with shedding needles, smell of mildew and (occasionally) great big bugs. But somehow lumpy misshapen sad sacks of trees with thin spots turned out looking pretty nice with its clear glass bulbs and enormous lights and twinkly spiny Sputniks and that weird treetop ornament that looked like a cross between Papal headgear and a 1950s spaceship.

There was lots of tinsel. There was always a certain give-and-take in the tinsel department. Mom argued that it was impossible to clean up and just ruined the vacuum, but we thought it was far too traditional to skip. We tended to save and reuse our tinsel (because we were cheap, not because we were particularly green), so instead of the tree being draped with long, graceful arcs of pristine gossamer tinsel, we had tinsel-wads shoved into the branches here and there. The tinsel would wind up on itself, often including needles and twigs from previous years, and form horrible Gordian knots that simply couldn't be undone. From a distance it looked okay, but up close the resemblance to the shavings one finds on the floor of a machine shop was striking.

We weren't much for "theme ornaments". We didn't put photographs or postcards in the tree, and we didn't have any Hallmark ornaments. It was pretty much a matter of lights, tinsel and bulbs for us, though I was known to hide model airplanes in the tree, especially a Heinkel He100D that I particularly favored. Somehow the tree just seemed to need unpainted plastic model airplanes, but even at my insensitive worst I recognized that model tanks were out of the question. (These days I resist the urge to put model airplanes in the tree, but whenever I'm invited anywhere for Christmas, I always at least think about bringing a model airplane and tucking it unseen into the host's tree so later they can scratch their heads and wonder what the hell is going on with the world.)

My first personal tree was a plastic two-footer that came complete with a string of about 25 lights and an equal number of silver bulbs roughly the size of grapes. The great advantage of this tree was that it was easy to take down; you simply grabbed it by the top and shoved it in a closet, still fully dressed. Every year rough treatment from the cats ruined a few bulbs, and eventually the thing developed a sad, weary Charlie Brown aspect. I eventually refreshed the ornamentation with new lights and bulbs, but then one of my cats developed the habit of spraying on the tree, which had the effect of turning it into a two-foot-tall piss-scented Glade air freshener. When you have to take your Christmas tree outside and try to make it palatable by squirting it with Formula 409 and spraying it with the garden hose, it might be time to get a new tree.

My wife does the ornamenting this year, which is only fair because 90% of the ornaments are hers. By my analysis we always end up with an insufficient number of lights and an excess of random ornaments, but my analysis is irrelevant. I like it when the tree is so bright you have to sort of avert your eyes from it. This year we've lost so many strings of lights we're finally going to have to get new ones, and as usual I'll wheedle without success for all-blue strings.

We use an artificial tree, of course, one of those dark green jobs that does a halfway decent job of simulating an actual tree. It's actually kind of sad - a simulated dying tree. But it beats a real dying tree, I guess, though I confess that sometimes I miss the ease of use of my old two-footer.

Modern ornaments seem to be either very expensive, or very huge. I know a guy who specializes in Hallmark ornaments, particularly the Star Trek ones, and they actually talk. It's kind of shocking to hear his tree suddenly blurt "Spock to Enterprise, Happy Holidays". Other of his ornaments light up, emit laser beams, shoot missiles and I don't know what all. I half-expect a Darth Vader ornament that says "I find your lack of faith disturbing." Meantime, Home Depot was offering ornaments that I swear were the size of cantaloupes in one case, and large infants in another. What would one do with an ornament that huge? Cut holes in it and make it into a boat??