If it had been up to me, we probably would have put our Christmas tree up this weekend, or if we had been too busy, sometime in the next week.  However, it was not up to me, and so the tree itself was standing in our living room as of November 28th or so, and decorated the evening of December 1st.  I understand why Kim wanted it up early - she’s heading back to Fredericton next weekend and wanted more time to enjoy it.  And I don’t really have anything against putting the tree up this early; it just demonstrates a minor philosophical difference between the two of us.  Below are some pictures of our Christmas tree which we took last weekend and that I finally got around to posting.

This first picture is of the tree just after we finished putting the lights on it.  In all there are about 120 lights here; one string of 80 and another of 40, I think.  They’re LED lights that come with a control box, which lets you select one of eight different settings, such as “continuous glow”, “slow fade in”, “chasing lights” (which is really meant for outdoor placement in linear fashion, not wrapped around a tree), and “epileptic seizure-inducing flash”.  OK, so the last one isn’t really called that - but this is a surprisingly accurate description.

Last Christmas, at one of the post-Boxing Day “gotta get rid of all our spare Christmas stuff” sales, we picked up about 100 feet of silver bead garland for pretty cheap.   This next picture shows the tree with the garland strung; we actually managed to encircle the tree eight or nine times, and then run five or size vertical segments with the leftovers.

When it came time to actually place ornaments on the tree, Kim and I encountered another minor philosophical difference, in that I apparently don’t have a deep-seated need to place an ornament on every single branch.  Call me a minimalist, I guess.  I would have been more than happy with a tree decorated about half as much as what we ended up with.  To be fair, I also probably would have positioned the tree in a corner instead of out in the middle of the room; fewer ornaments would have been needed to cover the back side of the tree.  In the end, I think it looks pretty good, despite being a tad crowded.  Note that the lowest row of ornaments consists entirely of cheap fabric ball ornaments, which are basically there to keep Smokey (also pictured) away from the more expensive and/or breakable ones further up.  Incidentally, that velvety red tree skirt collects cat hair like nobody’s business.

The last thing we needed was a tree-topper of some kind, which we actually picked up later that weekend.  It took some engineering trickery to get the damned thing to stay up there - it has a clothespin-type clip on the bottom, which is fine, but it’s off-center, so no matter what way you clip it, the center of mass of the star (which is rather heavy) is not above the centerline of the tree, and it wants to lean over.  Eventually we found a position that is marginally stable, and I twisted a couple of the nearby branches through the framework to hold it steady.

After all that preamble, here’s the money shot: what the tree looks like when it’s fully lit up.  Ooh.

Last Christmas we had a “secret Santa” gift exchange at the lab, and I picked up a Santa hat.  We came across it when unpacking the rest of the decorations, and I consented to wear it for a while, and even get my picture taken wearing it, if Kim would do the same.  So here we are in all our holiday splendor.  (I still say Kim looks far better in the hat than I do.)