Confessions of a Christmas Nut – Part II

I’ve got my (four) Christmas trees up early this year—because, when daughter Eleni and her husband Emilio and our brand new granddaughter Amalía came for Thanksgiving, we knew that they would not be back for Christmas. (They’re going to Emilio’s family in Nicaragua.) So, under Eleni’s direction, they bought a Christmas Tree the day after Thanksgiving and decorated it the same day so we all could take “Christmas photos.” 

Here are some shots of three-month-old Amalia gazing at her first Christmas tree in wonder.  We stuck to a mostly silver color scheme this year for the “real” tree, with some spots of red. The other trees—the “antique ornaments” tree, the “shoe tree” and the porch “cookies & candy” tree are pretty much the same as last year, so I thought I’d reprise last year’s blog post and photos below.

 (The happy family--E, E & A, and in the 2nd photo, Aunt Marina, better known as Tia Marina, trying to stuff Amalía into her stocking.)

It’s great that the Thanksgiving deadline spurred me to get the trees done early, but about now, I suspect that my Christmas cards are going to turn into New Year’s cards  (or Valentines!) if I don’t get them designed, printed, addressed and sent out this coming weekend.

How’s your holiday to-do list coming?  Any secrets for streamlining it?

Here's last year's post.  Click on the photos to enlarge them.

A Christmas Tree Nut

Right now I should be addressing Christmas cards but I'm in the grip of my seasonal craziness which involves decorating...lots...of...trees.

I also decorate doors and chandeliers and kitchen shelves and the grand piano and of course the mantel piece, but what I do most is trees.  Each with a theme.  In every room.  Well, not EVERY room because my husband has started to crack down on that--especially in his office, despite the lovely all white (sprayed snow and icicles and pine cones) tree I did one year.  It shed.

I think this is a genetic thing inherited from my mother.  At Christmas time she decorated so much that you couldn't find a flat surface available to set down your cup of eggnog.

So far I've only put up, um, four.  And I'm going to show them to you now.

On the day after Thanksgiving came the Real Tree, which goes in the living room.  I realize that's much too early and it will soon be very dry, but daughter Eleni and her brand new husband Emilio, with some other elves, insisted on dragging it home and putting on the lights as soon as the turkey was digested and the cranberry sauce was gone.  I usually pick a color scheme, and this year went with silver and white, with the only color coming from some crazy peacock ornaments I got from Pier One (which has great ornaments!  Have you seen the under-the-sea collection?  Squid and fish and lobsters and crayfish and mermaids.  Now there's a theme I haven't tried.)

With the peacocks, I also used lots of white butterflies (from the Dollar Store) and white birds and angel wings, so I guess the theme of the wonderful-smelling Real Tree this year would be wings.

In the dining room I always put a wire tree to show off my antique ornaments.  And I put a wire from the tree to the window latch so that it (hopefully) can't get knocked over.  You can see that we don't have snow yet in Massachusetts, unlike Minnesota, but we will soon.

Some of these ornaments are reproductions, but most are the real thing.  My grandmother had a whole tree decorated with blown-glass birds with those spun glass tails and often a metal clip to hold it on the tree.  I still have a few of hers.  I really love the fragile teapots once sold at every Woolworth's for pennies. They cost a lot more now.  The blown-glass ornaments usually say "West Germany" on the metal cap.  The  glass ornaments that were once screw-in lights were made in Japan between 1930 and 1950 and are a lot less likely to break.

In the library I always put my Shoe Tree, which started when the Metropolitan Museum in New York first started selling ornaments based on shoes in their collections.  

This became a kind of mania and now I can't afford to buy the newest ones from the Museum, but I've added lots of cunning real (baby-sized) shoes, and people keep giving me more.  My favorites on this tree are the Chinese baby shoes that look like cats and the fur-lined baby moccasins and the tiny Adidas sneakers.

On the porch I've put the  Kitchen Tree, or Cookie & Candy Tree.  This was inspired by some friends who live in a tiny apartment and decorate their tree only with cookies and candy and pretzels and candy canes.  Then, when Christmas is over, they put it all outside for the birds and other New York fauna to enjoy.

As you can see, I've cheated quite a bit--adding ornaments that look like kitchen utensils and non-edible gingerbread men and peppermints.  An authentic Kitchen Tree should have chains of real popcorn and cranberries (which we did back when I had children small enough to enjoy stringing them.)

Last year  Trader Joe's sold little gingerbread men with holes already punched in their heads so I could string them on the tree, but this year the gingerbread men are frosted but the holes are missing, so I just  stabbed them with the wire hooks and it worked fine (and any that broke, I ate, of course. They taste better frosted.)

That's four trees so far and counting--I still haven't started decorating the tree in my studio that holds my stash of ornaments from Mexico and India, but that will come soon, and I haven't  shown you my Santa Claus collection and the miniature town in the bay window in the kitchen and the many creches we have from around the world....But let's face it, I have to get back to those Christmas cards.

A Christmas Tree Nut

Right now I should be addressing Christmas cards but I'm in the grip of my seasonal craziness which involves decorating...lots...of...trees.

I also decorate doors and chandeliers and kitchen shelves and the grand piano and of course the mantel piece, but what I do most is trees.  Each with a theme.  In every room.  Well, not EVERY room because my husband has started to crack down on that--especially in his office, despite the lovely all white (sprayed snow and icicles and pine cones) tree I did one year.  It shed.

I think this is a genetic thing inherited from my mother.  At Christmas time she decorated so much that you couldn't find a flat surface available to set down your cup of eggnog.

So far I've only put up, um, four.  And I'm going to show them to you now.

On the day after Thanksgiving came the Real Tree, which goes in the living room.  I realize that's much too early and it will soon be very dry, but daughter Eleni and her brand new husband Emilio, with some other elves, insisted on dragging it home and putting on the lights as soon as the turkey was digested and the cranberry sauce was gone.  I usually pick a color scheme, and this year went with silver and white, with the only color coming from some crazy peacock ornaments I got from Pier One (which has great ornaments!  Have you seen the under-the-sea collection?  Squid and fish and lobsters and crayfish and mermaids.  Now there's a theme I haven't tried.)

With the peacocks, I also used lots of white butterflies (from the Dollar Store) and white birds and angel wings, so I guess the theme of the wonderful-smelling Real Tree this year would be wings.

In the dining room I always put a wire tree to show off my antique ornaments.  And I put a wire from the tree to the window so that it (hopefully) can't get knocked over.  You can see that we don't have snow yet in Massachusetts, unlike Minnesota, but we will soon.

Some of these ornaments are reproductions, but most are the real thing.  My grandmother had a whole tree decorated with blown-glass birds with those spun glass tails and often a metal clip to hold it on the tree.  I still have a few of hers.  I really love the fragile teapots once sold at every Woolworth's for pennies. They cost a lot more now.  The blown-glass ornaments usually say "West Germany" on the metal cap.  The  glass ornaments that were once screw-in lights were made in Japan between 1930 and 1950 and are a lot less likely to break.

In the library I always put my Shoe Tree, which started when the Metropolitan Museum in New York first started selling ornaments based on shoes in their collections.  

This became a kind of mania and now I can't afford to buy the newest ones from the Museum, but I've added lots of cunning real (baby-sized) shoes, and people keep giving me more.  My favorites on this tree are the Chinese baby shoes that look like cats and the fur-lined baby moccasins and the tiny Adidas sneakers.

On the porch I've put the  Kitchen Tree, or Cookie & Candy Tree.  This was inspired by some friends who live in a tiny apartment and decorate their tree only with cookies and candy and pretzels and candy canes.  Then, when Christmas is over, they put it all outside for the birds and other New York fauna to enjoy.

As you can see, I've cheated quite a bit--adding ornaments that look like kitchen utensils and non-edible gingerbread men and peppermints.  An authentic Kitchen Tree should have chains of real popcorn and cranberries (which we did back when I had children small enough to enjoy stringing them.)

Last year  Trader Joe's sold little gingerbread men with holes already punched in their heads so I could string them on the tree, but this year the gingerbread men are frosted but the holes are missing, so I just  stabbed them with the wire hooks and it worked fine (and any that broke, I ate, of course. They taste better frosted.)

That's four trees so far and counting--I still haven't started decorating the tree in my studio that holds my stash of ornaments from Mexico and India, but that will come soon, and I haven't  shown you my Santa Claus collection and the miniature town in the bay window in the kitchen and the many creches we have from around the world....But let's face it, I have to get back to those Christmas cards.

Passover, Plagues & Spring in Manhattan & Massachusetts

Every March, on the first warm, spring-like day, I walk out the porch door in Grafton, MA and spy some purple crocuses in the otherwise barren garden. Then I know it’s finally spring. That didn’t happen this year for some reason, but on St. Patrick’s Day, I saw a clump of tiny purple irises (above) and knew that spring had finally come despite the record rains we’ve had lately.

This past weekend, in Manhattan, spring was much farther along. A walk through Central Park revealed flowering forsythia and almost-flowering magnolias and flocks of New Yorkers – lovers by the boat lake and kids climbing trees near Bethesda Fountain. On the way to the Park, tulips bloomed on the sidewalks and, in the lobby of the Metropolitan Museum, the huge vases were filled with flowering cherry branches.

It all served to remind me that Manhattan is the greatest city in the world, bar none, especially in Spring.

In Eli’s super-stocked, high-end market, where I go just to gape at the seasonal decorations and sky-high prices, I found the kid-friendly finger puppets shown above, which I had to have for my own, even though I don’t do Passover and, sadly, don’t know any small children to amuse or educate with these puppets.

The puppets are clearly mean to dramatize, at the Passover seder, the ten plagues which Yahweh visited on the Egyptians to convince the Pharaoh to let the Israelites go free, as recounted in Exodus.

I just couldn’t resist these little puppets embroidered with the names “Blood”, “Frogs”, “Lice”, “Animals”, “Cattle Plague” (he’s my favorite—the sick cow with the thermometer and the hot water bottle, ) “Boils”, “Hail”, “Locusts”, “Darkness” and “First Born.”

Only in New York!

Now back in Grafton, MA it’s raining like crazy and there are flood warnings, but I just saw the first robin outside the porch door, looking for ingredients to build a nest. It’s time to cut some forsythia and bring it inside to force it, first soaking it in the bathtub.

Happy Spring and Pesach Same’ach!

CONFESSIONS OF A CHRISTMAS TREE FREAK

I’ve mentioned before that I’m hoping to write a book called “Acing the Holidays” about sneaky shortcuts and ways to cut the time and stress devoted to this season. But when it comes to decorating a Christmas tree, I become irrational and I just…can’t…stop. (If there were a Greek name for this personality disorder I realized, it would be elatophilia)

Yesterday my husband walked into the kitchen and shouted “How many trees are we going to have?” The answer is five – each one with a different theme. And this year I’m trying to keep it down because I’m leaving for India two days after Christmas.

The first and most important Christmas tree is the one in the living room that we generally buy and wrestle into the house around Dec. 6, Saint Nicholas' Day. This year the tree came with a very PC tag that said “Balsam Fir --Thank you for choosing a real tree – a natural, renewable and recyclable resource! For every tree sold, 3 seedlings are planted in its place.”

When our kids were small, we used only unbreakable ornaments, and even tied a string to a nail in the wall to keep the tree upright in case of attack. But the kids grew up and went away and I acquired a whole variety of ornaments over time, so every year I do a different color scheme. Red and gold. Or all white. Or red and white. Or pink and burgundy.

This year I noticed in stores and catalogs that the trendy color scheme is chartreuse and red, but I decided to use some mirrored (like disco balls) ornaments and reflective chains and do the tree all in silver and mirrors with maybe some red ornaments. Then I found at the dollar store some VERY cheap clear plastic ornaments that looked glass. At TJ Maxx, I also found at a discount price three dozen clip-on white butterflies with silver glitter on their wings (which are made of white feathers.)

It always takes me about two evenings to get all the clear mini lights on the tree – about a thousand lights in all. Then I started putting on chains and the butterflies and a couple of ornaments. I know I’m supposed to leave some decorating for when the kids get home right before Christmas, but I got a little carried away.

I was so happy with the monochromatic, sparkling, disco-ball tree that I decided not to put anything red on, except for a single red butterfly that I found at the dollar store. You can see the tree above. (If you click on the photo it will be larger.) It looks like the tree of the Snow Queen, I think. Or like the poor ice-encrusted trees in our yard that have been falling down or losing branches ever since the ice storm last Friday.

This tree is definitely not done – not until we have the ceremony of putting the angel on top on Christmas Eve after church (and then we each get to open one package.)

The tree that I always put up next is the Shoe Tree in my office. It’s a table-top artificial tree and everything on it or around it is about SHOES.

This started back when the Metropolitan Museum decided to sell ornaments based on the shoes in their collections. It was a very profitable idea and soon everyone was selling shoe ornaments. And people started giving me actual shoes – I have antique high-button baby shoes and fabulous Adidas sneakers meant for a baby and some real leather and fur antique baby Indian moccasins. My favorite is a pair of Chinese baby slippers that look like cats.

Now I’ve told you about two of my five trees. Next time I’ll tell you about the wire tree with antique ornaments, the little Mexican tree with five Nativity scenes, and the Kitchen tree that is decorated mainly with edible decorations.

My name is Joan and I'm a Christmas tree addict.....