Decorating for Christmas

Looking at our family calendar over the coming couple of weeks, Valerie and I decided that Monday was a do or die day for setting up the Christmas tree this year. Somehow the season has caught up with us quickly but this seemed to be a worth Family Home Evening endeavor.

Christmas has come up fast this year. In fact I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that it was just last week that I finally took the pumpkins off the front porch although in my defense, it took motivation to finally decide to remove that 100lb.+ monstrosity. I had secretly been hoping for the past month that some local teens would swipe and dispose of the thing for me but apparently our locals were too scrawny for the task.

Valerie and I are “blessed” with a rich supply of Christmas decorations from which to choose when we finally set up. I think it has something to do with the fact that we were married less than a week before Christmas way back in 1992 and received many decorations as wedding presents way back then. Should the motivation strike, we definitely have the ability to pimp the house out as a winter wonderland. That motivation is yet to strike.

This year we decided to go with minimal Christmas décor.

Of primary concern was the Christmas Tree since without this, Santa wouldn’t know what to put gifts under. We have a fake tree and I like it that way. We live in Washington. If I want to see a real pine, all I have to do is look out my window. If I were outside blindfolded and threw a rock, there is a very good chance it would hit a pine. We don’t need one in our house.

We do have a nice fake tree at least. We bought it back in 1999 at Sears in Portland, Oregon. It is one of those nifty trees that has the lights already built in. The tree has served us well and has survived much. It is very easy to assemble although I do purposely wear long sleeves when doing so since it has a tendency to exfoliate you arms to the extreme as you put the thing together. This may be our phony tree’s last year with the family as many of the sections of lights are starting to go out on us. We have to use a couple of strings of lights now to fill in the gaps.

We have a tradition with our kids that has evolved over the past few years as well. We have one special pickle ornament that is of the greatest privilege to hang on our tree for some reason. Mom & Dad sit on the couch as each child points in the box to a wrapped ornament that they wish to hang. Whoever happens to pick the pickle is declared the winner! You don’t win anything other than the glory of having been the pickle picker but that is good enough. You can tell it is special though because the losers inevitably end up in tears or accusing the winner of cheating.

This game is taken seriously enough that we carefully have to hide the place the pickle is hidden in the ornament box from the children lest they remember for the following year. When we pack up the decorations, the kids always leave notes in the ornament box as well to their future selves of the next year reminding themselves that the pickle is in the box and that the finder is the winner. This year, Josh was the winner! He hung the pickle in the most prominent place on the tree right under the angel-topper’s feet.

Benjamin had a good time hanging ornaments this year as well. This year he finally got to help hang them up instead of us having to hide the delicate ornaments out of his reach.

The tree was filled up pretty quickly this year and it was good to finally have some of the Christmas spirit in the living room if not yet in our hearts.

One other mandatory Christmas decoration that we have in the family is Douglas Fir. Douglas Fir is a creepy little anthromorphic Christmas tree that lives in our downstairs bathroom each December. Douglas Fir would be better suited as a Halloween decoration as he can be quite frightening.

You see, Douglas fir has a motion sensor, whenever somebody enters the bathroom, mouth appears from its hiding place amongst his pine boughs and his eyes light up and open. He asks in an extremely loud voice, “DO YOU KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS?... IT’S CHRISTMAS TIME!” at which point he burst into song. Inevitably you forget that Douglas is lurking in the bathroom and you are scared half out of your wits when his eyes light up in the dark and he starts yelling. This is not good since you already had to use the restroom and probably also hinders us on the potty-training biz.

Douglas Fir should have probably been retired several years ago. One eye is falling off which doesn’t help with the creepy factor and he is showing his age. Still though, he is beloved by the kids. We like him so much that Zachary’s middle name is taken right from his. Zachary Douglas(Fir) VanderHoeven.

Apparently other people find him to be frightening as well. In fact I found online instructions for turning Douglas into a ghost.

Other than that, the only decoration that we decided to go with this year was a nativity set. We have a really nice one that we got at Costco several years ago but as with all things at Costco, it is very large. There are a lot of characters and animals but the people stand like 14” tall so it takes a lot of room to set up. We decided to forgo that set this year and instead Valerie set up a new Willowtree set that she had received as a Christmas gift last year.

This set is still pretty basic (apparently the wise-men are still en route) but I have been hinted that there are many more additions that can be made.

Our house is starting to have a pretty good scattering of these Willowtree guys around here and there. If I’ve got t his right, they are resin figurines that have the look of having been rough-carved from wood (willow I suppose?). They are all faceless which vaguely reminds me of a Pink Floyd video for some reason but somehow they are not disturbing. Valerie likes them.

With that, I think we are sufficiently decorate that our kids won’t have traumatic memories of childhood. The one thing I might still like to get up is the lights on the house should I be able to locate them easily in the garage but even if we don’t get those up this year, I think we will live.