This year, I bought a really small tree. We learned our lesson after I trimmed away $25 worth of needles last year to make it fit in our tiny house. This tree is so small that I had to put it on a pedestal and cover it up with a skirt.

We decided the tiny ornaments we used to hang on our table-top tree in DC are too small for a real tree, so we decorated with a bunch of ornaments from our childhood. There are giant balls that feature Snoopy, Mickey, and the Pink Panther. It looks pretty retro, so we decided it would look even better with a retro-looking star on top. So I went out to the garage, cut up some scrap plywood, and glued it into a 1950s-looking Christmas tree topper.

I glued a clothes pin to the back, spray-painted it silver, and clipped it to the top of our tree.

I think it looks pretty apt, but we’ll buy or make a real one next year. I’d go whole hog and load this thing up with tacky silver tinsel but I’m afraid the cats would choke to death, thereby making the wife a very unhappy camper, and possibly ruining bowl season for me. So no tinsel.

We don’t decorate a lot besides throwing some lights on the front porch shrubs and hanging the stockings on the mantle. By the way, how funny is it that I have a wife who sews, but we have buttons on our stockings instead of embroidery?

We need to update the pictures in the buttons. Those fresh, young faces just remind us how much we’ve aged over the past few years.

On a whim, the wife decided we needed a real tree this year. Like always, that impulse cost us a small fortune. Not only did we have to pay for an eight foot Frazier fir, but we also had to buy a tree stand, skirt, lights, topper, and some grown-up ornaments. We own several ornaments, but most of them are those little Hallmark collections that celebrate cartoon characters. You know, tiny Peter Pans and Tiggers and R2D2s and all the other symbols of the dreaded Consumer/Entertainment Complex. They’re just too small for a big tree. So after burning a few hundred bucks, we opened our arms and hearts to this slowly dying plant that will leak sap and shed needles all over my hardwood floors for the next five weeks.

UPDATE: The topper didn’t seem to fit with our other decorations, so I made a retro-looking star out of some wood scraps in my workshop.