The “Charlie Brown” tree of artificial trees

I made an effort to replace our Christmas tree this year, I really did. I looked at all the fake trees they had at Fred Meyer; I looked at some online places too. None of them had the pretty fiber optics of this old tree, and none of them were that beautiful regardless, so I gave up and hauled this tree out of the garage for one more season. The cycling colored lights in the microfilaments have been gone for years – I couldn’t find a bulb of the proper wattage, and without that the lights just stay golden. But that’s pretty enough. The various branches are all bunched in and misshapen now, making some rather unappealing gaps, but that’s okay too, I guess. The main issue is that one of the feet of the stand is broken, and without being carefully stabilized, the tree is liable to topple over. And of course, we have 10-lb critters ready to launch themselves at anything at any moment.

So far so good, though. I guess one advantage of waiting all the way until December 19th to set up the tree is that it only has to last for six more days. We restricted ourselves to fabric and paper ornaments, and by adding one strand of multicolored lights, it’s actually quite festive. And neither of the cats is attacking the ornaments or trying to climb the tree... yet. Fingers crossed, eh?