O Tannenbaum

As a child I remember nagging my family put up our Christmas tree at the beginning of the season, the day after Thanksgiving. Now I'm lucky if I get to see the tree when I go home a few days before Christmas. But this year after seeing themed trees bursting with ribbon and ornaments at the Festival of trees I knew it was up to me to revive the Christmas spirit in Utah.

I made Skip help me construct a tree from copper wire. Actually I think he ripped the wire from my hands when I failed to correctly twist and pull the wire. Then we strung popcorn and cranberries on more wire to wrap around our tree. Again the decoration was ripped from my hands. Why? Because I failed to find the exact spot to puncture the popcorn. For those of you who have never thread popcorn along wire there is an exact spot on the popcorn where the wire must go. Funny I never found that spot but did force the popcorn into place.

We ended up with a mess of a spirally wiry tree that couldn't hold the popcorn and cranberry necklace. It leaned like a Dr. Seuss hat and provoked the embarrassment and love of a sparse Charlie Brown tree. I guess it was the result of a middle-aged white rapper fond of rhyming and a forlorn girl missing a homemade Christmas.

We bought a live evergreen a few days later. It has white lights and silver glitter ornaments.