Apparently, my Uncle's house has been designated Christmas Central this year, so various members of the family will congregate there as the day approaches. Sadly, I'm so low on money (student life, what can I say) that I won't be buying many presents.
I know it's really too early for people to be putting up and switching on their outdoor Christmas lights, but as someone who is out in the dark early in the morning, I do like seeing them! They cheer me up no end
Tonight I put up some lights -- usually I wait until Thanksgiving day, but the apartment needed some extra cheer.
If there's one thing I truly miss about Canadian Christmases, it's outdoor lights reflecting on the snow. More and more people where I live now put up outdoor lights, but it's just not the same. My daughter asked me this morning if we can put the decorations up December 1st, and I said what the hell. The bags containing the Halloween decorations are still on the upstairs landing and I think my husband is planning on putting the Halloween stuff away in the loft when the Christmas stuff comes down. I don't do ladders at all so never go in the loft, and my husband hates balancing precariously on the stepladder to haul himself in and out of the loft hatch, so I can't blame him for waiting to put the Halloween stuff away.
I put up a chain of 40 LED-lit balls (half of them ping-pong-ball size, half of them double that) in the yard yesterday (IKEA "KALLT") -not an x-mas decoration per se, more of a it's getting dark early and we really need some light in that yard anyway-thing... Think I'll se if they have more of those chains on Tuesday when I return to IKEA (after all they were 30% off and I could use that sort for x-mas lights in the windows in the front room )
I'm debating whether or not to pull the old fake tree out of the garage and put it up. We'll be busy all this week and the week after.
Our usual time for the trees and decorations to go up is two weeks before christmas. It all comes down again in the first week of January.
My tree usually goes up on 1 Dec and stays up until 1 Jan. However last year the tree didn't go up until mid-Dec because I was in Adelaide visiting my sister.
I think I'm going to put my tree up this weekend. It's an artificial one, but does the job nicely enough. But since I'm going to be at home more than in previous years, it could be fun to have a real tree again. I haven't had one in many years. So I might get one a bit later in the season.
We've decided to have a real tree this year but I don't want to have a fire hazard in my front room come Christmas Day, so we'll wait a few weeks to get it. However the decorations will probably come down from the loft this weekend, and be put up over the following few days. When I was growing up we always had a live tree but my dad would always wait 'til just a few days before Christmas to buy it. The result was a Charlie Brown-like tree with not enough branches and half its needles missing. From an early age I learned to be creative with the garland and ornaments to try to make Emo Tree look reasonable. Since I have no intention of ever having an Emo Tree again we'll be getting our tree by the 10th or so. We live within a short drive of several good gardening centres so there will be a good selection.
I come from a real tree-family, when one set of my grandparents began using artificial candles (electric lights on the tree ) we made so much fun of it it only lasted a few years I can live without a tree, in fact I'd rather do that than have a fake one, but it just wouldn't be x-mas without the real smell of one. I usually hang something on the wall for that (and for the decorative element of course)...
Growing up we used to get the tree round about when school broke up (around the 16th/17th of December, usually) but once or twice we left it really late and ended up driving around from one place to another in a desperate race to find a decent-looking tree on the 23rd or even Christmas Eve. Funnily enough, these last-minute adventures in the cold and dark have stayed in my memory as being far more fun than the years we got a tree in good time.
Childhood x-mas tree stories? -I've got one as well We used to drive to the woods to cut down our own tree! -'twas only a 10 km drive though and when I say 'cut' it is an exaggeration; 'saw' is more correct... We usually made a day of it: three families together; a walk around the lake/in the wood (more fun those winters when you could bring skates!) with a picnic (more fun when you're old enough to have the alcoholic content also). Then finding the perfect tree and securing it to the car -like a vegetarian hunters trophy. After bringing the tree home we'd meet up at one of our houses for a nice hot meal. This would usually take place about two weeks before x-mas eve.
It's the same for me, really. Dad's gawdawful trees became as much a tradition as attending the early Christmas Eve mass and opening our presents afterwards. My absolute favourite tree was one with such a huge missing-branches gap that I had to be extraordinarily creative with the garland. The joke was that our tree always stood in the corner of the room, so the side with this big gap was the good side of the tree. By the time I was in my late teens my mother would give my older brother and me some money to buy a tree in mid-December. The local Scout troop always sold very good trees in one of the local church parking lots, and we bought our trees from them for years.
Aw, good stories, both of you. Now I really am feeling Christmassy. I think I'll open that bottle of Oloroso sherry tonight.
Even though we have a fake tree I do love the smell of the real ones, so we buy that bottled spray imitation. It actually smells really accurate and you tend to forget it's even fake.