An "Ooooh, Shiny!" for Christmas

Gentle readers, I have done zilch on the house the past month or so, unless you count strewing a modicum of Christmas decorations amidst the demounted trim boards, plaster residue, and pet hair furballs as "doing something" on the house. Oh, yes, I did get my outside decorations up, thus contributing my bit towards the festive aspect of the neighborhood.

Nope. I've substitute-taught every blessed day this month in a rather difficult school and I come home exhausted. It's a good thing I have my outside Christmas lights on a timer; otherwise half the time they wouldn't get turned on. Or off.

But to contribute to the festivity of the houseblogs community (and to make sure I have at least one post in December), I present a little vid I did of my Christmas tree three years ago.



It will have to stand in for a full-height tree again this year: Until I get the demounted living room and dining room baseboards refinished and back up, it's only the old "bottle brush" tree on top of the piano for me.

Light-Up Night

Tonight was Light-Up Night in Beaver, Pennsyl-vania.

The display is nothing like what you see on the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Missouri. But the fun here is inversely greater. On the Plaza, the lights come on in a formal ceremony featuring area celebrities, then everybody jumps in their cars and heads home; in Beaver, the lights come on when nobody in particular is paying attention and afterwards people hang around and enjoy the town and the cold weather and the start of the Christmas season.

I went with my friends Hannah* and Steve* and their kids Stevie* and Letty.* The line to see Santa in the park gazebo stretched all the way to the corner, so we fortified ourselves with the free hot chocolate and doughnuts with chocolate icing and red, green, and white jimmies and headed for the shops.

Light-Up Night is open house for the merchants in Beaver. Most of the stores on Third Street (the main thorough-fare), their windows and interiors decorated to the hilt, stay open for business and offer cookies and cider and other goodies. Christmas music, live and canned, sings out into the night air, and horse-drawn carriages, wheeled sleighs, and charabancs ply up and down the broad avenue, offering rides for free. People of all ages meander up and down and in and out, and I think it's extremely sporting for the proprietors of establishments crowded with pretty things to throw their doors open the festive crowd-- many of whom are not carrying money.

Having two elementary-school-aged kids along both enlivened and complicated things. They wanted to do everything at once and we adults didn't always know where or when or how. So we did the logical thing and threaded our way down one side of the street then back up the other.

Stopped into the new Japanese restaurant to pick up a menu; visited a shop full of decorative objects, including a lamp made out of a bottle adorned with a shirtless photo of Steelers safety Troy Polamalu (lol); met up with friends on the street; got a bag of fresh hot popcorn in front of the Municipal Building; finally got to see the inside of the new kitchen store and was treated to a demo of a food mill of the sort I'll need next time I make quince butter; and back to the two-story toy store where we hung out with the kids warming up and playing with things till time for the fireworks.

For me, the high point of this perambu-lation was found up a narrow, oriental-carpeted stairway to a second-floor suite over one of the storefronts. It was a brand-new accountant's office, just opened today, and the decor was smashing. It looked like the sort of place they'd feature in one of those glossy decorating magazines that give everyone a bad case of the covets. Bare brick and Venetian plaster walls, antique furniture, graceful draperies and appointments; unless you were a houseblogger you'd never believe that when they first saw the space it had looked, in the words of someone in the know, "like a pigsty." The accountant and her friends had laid out a spread of pastries, dry sausage, and cheese, with an urn of hot cider, and more attractive to me than that, the project carpenter was there. And I got his card (I may need help remounting my trim!). And the accountant gave me the name of her plasterer! Not a bad night's work!

At 8:00 o'clock we stood in the street and watched the fireworks, then headed back to the park. Earlier we'd seen a little carriage drawn by a pair of Shetland ponies over there, and Hannah thought it'd be fun for the children to ride. But by then, the ponies were nowhere to be seen. Oh, well! The line to see Santa was quite short; in fact, Stevie and Letty were the last ones in.

We ended the evening with a ride in one of the charabancs, behind a fine pair of golden brown draft horses (Morgans?). This took us down the main street then round the long block into one of the narrow residential streets behind. Seeing the brick pavement and the historic houses with candles in the windows, I could almost visualize how it might have been over a hundred years ago, riding in a horse-drawn vehicle along that way as a matter of course.

Monday, I'll have to call that plasterer. Good chance he's way too expensive for me, but maybe he'll be nice enough to tell me where he gets his supplies.

On the Eleventh Day of Christmas

It's now or never for reflections on Christmas decorations.

I got a live, fresh-cut Christmas tree for the first time this Christmas season. Usually, I wait till Lowe's or somebody puts theirs on sale. But this year, the Lowe's trees were 75% off by December 19th-- and you could tell why. Most of them had all the needles fallen off the lower branches. Pathetic.

So on the 21st I went to the only local Christmas tree farm that grows Fraser firs, and got one from them. (The saga is documented here.)

The people at the tree farm said I didn't have to recut the base of the tree after I got home. But next time I'm doing it anyway. It was an hour and a half between the time the saw hit the tree's trunk and the time I got it into water, and that isn't that long. But it hasn't been drinking that much water out of the stand ever since. And that worries me.

Maybe it's not drinking because it's not thirsty, because it was cut fresh? Maybe I'm inexperienced and don't know how a fresh cut tree behaves?

Well, maybe. But if I make a new cut after I get it home, I'll be sure.

Anyway, I put the tree in the stand and brought it inside. This is how it looked:

Nice and conical and symmetrical, right?

And here's how it looked Christmas Eve after I got the lights on it:

Hardly like the same tree. Like something straight out of Dr. Seuss. You expect Cindy Lou Who to make her appearance any second.

What's the problem? Wilting? Dryness? Excessive heat? (In case you're wondering, that baseboard register is closed.)

No, it's the new strings of lights I bought this year and last, the ones with the lamps 3" on center. With my aesthetic insistance that the lights be clipped to the branches and not float loose between them, this goofy result was inevitable. And so up to where I ran out of clips, about 2/3 of the way up, my tree is effectively roped and hogtied.

So you want a New Year's resolution? I resolve for Christmas 2008 to find some lights with wider spacing. The ones I have take too long to put on, anyway.

But here's something that worked, and I recommend it to all pet owners whose dogs and cats like to drink out of the basin of the Christmas tree stand.

You know those e-collars that fit around a dog's neck to keep him from biting himself where he shouldn't? I clipped two of them together around the trunk to keep the cats out of the tree water. I had one e-collar already, and made a mental note to get another from the pet supply store as soon as I saw the kittens make their first beeline for the stand.

It's great. No puddles on the floor and no cats drinking stuff they shouldn't.

Only question I have now is, do I store the e-collars with the pet supplies, or with the Christmas decorations?