postmodernfamilyblog

Our Christmas tree – the boys’ Christmas tree – hardly looks like an HGTV tree. Chip and Joanna would not approve. And I have to admit, I don’t rightly know that I do either. But I am letting it stand — As Is – a bead-dripping, ball-clumping conglomeration of toddler artistic interpretation and strategic disarray. I mean, it is an absolute cluster.

In the beginning, I tried to go behind and guide my boys toward proper ornament placement — to demonstrate scale and visual hierarchy, leading lines and symmetry — to advocate for the balance and brilliance of a beautifully appointed Christmas tree (or at least to show them empty branches begging for attention), but they would have none of it. They knew exactly where they wanted those twelve tangled strings of beads and precisely where to place that Santa head with the snowy, tousled beard — it catches on every pine needle and if you’re not careful he can wind up looking more like Marley’s Ghost than Jolly Old Saint Nick. (Ahem, they weren’t careful.)

Now if you know me and my love of Christmas Villages and my passion for perfectly placed blown glass ornaments collected over a lifetime, you know this has not been easy for me.  My fingers are just itching to get in there and tidy things up.

But I was cautioned by their dad that it doesn’t really matter if I like it or not: it’s their tree. And what matters is that they’re proud of it. Which they are. They have touched up and tweaked their masterpiece all day long.

Now our boys have distinct personalities – and they trimmed the tree with tactical procedures and divergent techniques entirely reflective of those distinct personalities.

Parker is our motion machine. He loves trucks and running – and he used both in his approach. He ran. Fast. From packing box to pre-lit bough. Laughing all the way. And the trucks, you ask? Well, when he wasn’t hauling ass, he was hauling ornaments in his green metal dump truck. At first, he hauled them the old-fashioned way – piled in its bed in a giant, glittering heap. But then he got a bit creative and hung them off the rear end like metallic ball fringe, Beep-Beep-Beeping as he backed it into place. He front-loaded the tree with about a dozen balls this way – some frosted, some glittered, some gleaming — all on the same two branches, reinforced with the cording from the lights.

Tate, our theatrical boy, well, his presentation was all splash and pizzazz (jazz hands may have been involved.) He danced to Mariah Carey’s Christmas classic as he worked, twisting and jiving all the while.  He flung crimson beads with gleeful abandon into the tree, preferring a vertical configuration to the more traditional horizontal swag. There they remain, dripping and pooling to the floor like a flapper’s beaded skirt tossed carelessly to the side after a long night at a speakeasy.

While their styles may be polar-opposite, both boys had one thing in common: they were all about that base, ‘bout that base, no treetop… So I had to take it upon myself to bedazzle our evergreen’s upper registers.  Her higher frequencies are arranged in a modest, classical tempo, her rhythm and chords carefully constructed to provide an aesthetically pleasing harmony. But she never takes herself too seriously —  I mean how, could she, when she resembles a Gatsby party-goer the morning after – un-gartered and unraveled and entirely unashamed.

Yes, our tree is a sight. She’s definitely not winning any Southern Living photo shoots, that’s for sure. But she IS winning big time in our boys’ hearts.

After all, we’re building memories here, not designer trees.