Home for the Holidays: Leave no branch bare on your Christmas tree
Home for the Holidays Series: This year, local reporters and editors are using Thanksgiving week to share our favorite holiday traditions and recipes with you, our readers.
Let’s talk about decorating your Christmas tree. I grew up in Texas. In the south, Christmas tree decorating is a competitive sport. However, I've lived in Michigan for over two decades and both of my children were born here, so I can appreciate the contributions the north has made to this process — chiefly, real coniferous trees and snow.
Being a purist, I started my life up-north by immediately culling pine trees from my 14-acre property. This entailed forcing the father of my children to — like Clark Griswold — cut down the prettiest one I hand-selected each season and dragging it into our home.
Of course, this was always easier said than done.
The children and I had many moments of concern for the well-being of their father during this annual activity —which included limb loss and possible head trauma from the falling evergreen — as we stood in our puffer coats and gloves watching him execute my orders.
The trees were always beautiful — standing at maybe 15 feet high in our living room.
But they had a lot of holes — spaces that needed to be filled where the branches didn’t grow equally. So I became a connoisseur of the most impactful Christmas tree decorations, ones that would cover up the God-given variations in our home-grown trees.
This consists of placing large ornaments in the voids of the tree. Candy canes, giant bulbs, Santa heads — whatever it takes.
And this is my point to you, reader — if you have a natural tree — invest in large decorations to fill inconsistencies. Not all of them have to be big, but you should purchase at least five or six large items to cover the abnormal growth areas.
I must admit, now that we've moved from those acres and my baby daddy is no longer around, I have a fake tree in my living room. But I haven't stopped including large pieces in my overall tree decoration. It makes all the difference.
At this point, I suppose you could say I don’t like any one branch of my Christmas tree to go without. Is it too much? No, ma’am, it ain’t.
— Contact reporter Annie Doyle at 231-675-0099 or adoyle@charlevoixcourier.com
This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Home for the Holidays: Leave no branch bare on your Christmas tree
