KristyWes

A Royal Tannenbaum

Hey, lil' cutie!

This here is the Christmas tree I mentioned yesterday. How cute is he!? And he smells good, too.

The nice man who sold us this purty fir tree gave us some instructions on how to take care of it. Fill the stand with hot tap water at first, then room-temp water going forward. And you can help things along by crushing up some aspirin in the water once a week. (If you're wondering whether ibuprofin would also do the trick, the answer is 'no.' We already asked.)

Admittedly, the tree could use a little sprucing* up, and we're working on that. I know I used to own ornaments at one point during my career as an adult, but I don't know where they've gotten off to now.

It's possible the ornaments were thrown away during The Great Cull of 2006, when - faced with the prospect of carrying all my stuff up five flights of stairs into a new apartment - I decided to quickly lighten my load and kick a lot of belongings to the curb. Including, but not limited to: a couch, my snow boots, and a cashmere sweater.

Yes, I made a lot of rash decisions during The Great Cull, but it seems unlikely the ornaments (some of which were over 30 years old) would have been one of my curbside victims. I can be ruthless with cashmere, but I'm pretty tender when it comes to nostalgia.

More likely they ended up in my Spanish Harlem storage unit, along with my framed college diploma, the Buddha lamp, angst-ridden journals from my teenage years, and four place settings of Fiesta Ware - none of which were needed (nor fit!) in my current cozy apartment.

If that's the case, I'm afraid those ornaments are going to be spending Christmas in el barrio because I don't have time to go cross-town and retrieve them any time soon...

...Which means I'll need to find a home-grown way to decorate our little Christmas tree. Off the top of my head, I'm thinking of tying silverware to the boughs with dental floss. Any other suggestions?

*Sprucing! Spruce! Everyone loves an evergreen pun, am I right?