When I was seven or eight, I bought a little fake Christmas tree from one of my teachers who was leaving Liberia. I paid one dollar, although I can't remember if it was one Liberian dollar or one US dollar, and whether that difference mattered at all at the time (the Liberian dollar was pegged 1 to 1 to the US dollar for a long time). I think it had one single strand of lights, with some replacement bulbs, and I became very skilled at inspecting and fixing every single bulb and every single wire in the string when the lights went out, which they did often because they were the old-fashioned kind of lights in which the failure of any one bulb results in a failure of the entire strand.
We set the tree up on a table in my bedroom, and surrounded it with presents, some bigger than the tree. It was magical.
This year, I had a vision of tromping through snow (I think there was a soundtrack of lovely carols in my vision) and cutting a tiny Christmas tree for my little apartment. More carols would play as I lovingly decorated it with family heirloom ornaments perfectly sized for the little tree.
That didn't happen. I don't have a car, first of all, nor do I have a saw, or a tree stand, or, for that matter, money. Or even ornaments. And Christmas has just jumped forward in time, it seems. It came far too quickly.
I put up some white lights in the window, and I figured that plus Handel's Messiah and the gingerbread candle were holiday cheer enough.
Then someone brought a little fake tree into work. I was not immediately won over by this tree, because it was shiny. Green, but shiny. Another childhood experience of mine involved a shiny silver tree that my school in Liberia used. Every year, we had to sort 500 million (or so) little branches and try to put them into the right slots and cover up the places where branches were missing. And did I mention that it was silver? We had a hard enough time re-creating a culturally US American-like Christmas in Liberia (tropical weather? anyone? palm trees instead of pines?) without adding silly things like unnaturally colored fake Christmas trees. I never really accepted the color of that tree.
I was intrigued, however, by the low cost of the shiny green tree, and the proximity of the store that sold it to my work. Convenience beat out aesthetics (despite the fact that W@lgreens, purveyor of normal matte forest green fake trees and pretty much everything else a person could need other than food, is something like six entire blocks from my apartment), and I came home with a shiny little green tree.
It's actually two colors: bright shiny green, and matte lime green. It all looks very odd in the harsh light of day, but in the evening, after I added colored lights (colored lights are for trees, white lights for other decorations, I think), and a set of little round shiny ornaments, it suddenly looks, well, sparkly. Festive. Not unnatural after all. I have my own little tree in my own little apartment.
No carols magically played, though. I had to start the Messiah cd myself.
We set the tree up on a table in my bedroom, and surrounded it with presents, some bigger than the tree. It was magical.
This year, I had a vision of tromping through snow (I think there was a soundtrack of lovely carols in my vision) and cutting a tiny Christmas tree for my little apartment. More carols would play as I lovingly decorated it with family heirloom ornaments perfectly sized for the little tree.
That didn't happen. I don't have a car, first of all, nor do I have a saw, or a tree stand, or, for that matter, money. Or even ornaments. And Christmas has just jumped forward in time, it seems. It came far too quickly.
I put up some white lights in the window, and I figured that plus Handel's Messiah and the gingerbread candle were holiday cheer enough.
Then someone brought a little fake tree into work. I was not immediately won over by this tree, because it was shiny. Green, but shiny. Another childhood experience of mine involved a shiny silver tree that my school in Liberia used. Every year, we had to sort 500 million (or so) little branches and try to put them into the right slots and cover up the places where branches were missing. And did I mention that it was silver? We had a hard enough time re-creating a culturally US American-like Christmas in Liberia (tropical weather? anyone? palm trees instead of pines?) without adding silly things like unnaturally colored fake Christmas trees. I never really accepted the color of that tree.
I was intrigued, however, by the low cost of the shiny green tree, and the proximity of the store that sold it to my work. Convenience beat out aesthetics (despite the fact that W@lgreens, purveyor of normal matte forest green fake trees and pretty much everything else a person could need other than food, is something like six entire blocks from my apartment), and I came home with a shiny little green tree.
It's actually two colors: bright shiny green, and matte lime green. It all looks very odd in the harsh light of day, but in the evening, after I added colored lights (colored lights are for trees, white lights for other decorations, I think), and a set of little round shiny ornaments, it suddenly looks, well, sparkly. Festive. Not unnatural after all. I have my own little tree in my own little apartment.
No carols magically played, though. I had to start the Messiah cd myself.
No comments:
Post a Comment