I'm not here to judge. (Except bathroom trees? ::cough::getalife::cough::) No, I'm here to confess that I'm a lazy lump who can barely manage to get one (admittedly eight-foot) artificial, already-light-bedecked Christmas tree up and decorated every year. I love Christmas trees, but it's become an enormous ordeal.
This year I decided to cut back. I would only use the ornaments I actually liked. As it turns out, I actually only really like about a third of the ornaments I own.
I cut out all the child-oriented ornaments that I used to put all over the place. No Ninja Turtles, no Babar, no Cookie Monsters. I cut out all the commercial stuff: no M&M guys on skis, no Hersey elves, no Disney or Hallmark. No seven-year-old lovingly-produced kindergarten ornaments with missing parts.
This is what was left:
1. Things that are the right color--red, green, white, gold and silver.
2. Things with religious/seasonal significance--angels, stars, Father Christmas/Santa Claus.
3. Things that are natural--snowflakes, icicles, pine cones, acorns, birds, fruit.
I thought I was putting up a minimalist Christmas tree. When you bring up three boxes of ornaments and bring two of them back downstairs, still filled with ornaments, it certainly feels minimalist.
But the tree turned out prettier than ever. In fact, I liked it a lot, and I decided to head further in this direction. I would only buy new ornaments if they fit into those three categories.
Enter an email from the Metropolitan Museum. Ten dollars off a purchase of $50.
Well, their clearance section and sale sections brought me a veritable blizzard of new snowflake ornaments! Some of them are obviously chi-chi-poo-poo collectibles, way out of my price range. But others are way marked down, and with code K697, I saved an extra $10.
The truly pathetic, I'm a lazy lump part of this? My tree is still up. Which means that if the package shows up quickly, I might be hanging January clearance ornaments on the December tree.
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