This year, the Christmas tree at the Capitol, or "the People's tree," is from a district in California. It's been almost 15 years since a Christmas tree from California has secured the coveted spot as the National Christmas Tree.
Because this is apparently a really exciting occurrence, the Congressman from that particular district had a group get in touch with all the California offices to see if we'd also like a smaller tree for our offices delivered. Excited to enjoy the festivities of the Season, our office quickly accepted the offer of a smaller tree.
Our tree came on Tuesday, which I was very excited about. It came with ornaments, handmade from elementary students all over California, displaying the culture and pride of the California spirit. I was told we also had Christmas decorations in our storage, so I was ready to deck the office out. Luckily, part of those decorations included a tree stand (which I'm pretty sure hadn't been used in almost 15 years, incidentally).
Co-worker Rachel and I moved the furniture around the front office and got the tree set up in the corner, then we cut off the netting holding the tree in and tried to settle the branches down.
After about 5 minutes of attempting to settle the branches down to their normal spots, I realized that they were already in place - there just weren't that many branches to settle. The poor tree was rather tall and a little bit wimpy. I wasn't sure my plans for decorating the office were going to work - particularly after I went to our storage and found the one box of decorations, with one ugly garland wrapped with a string of lights, 11 miniature stockings, two wreaths, and a foam cut-out of coal from some old lobby group.
We pulled the string of lights off the garland (which was promptly tossed aside). I tried to think of a way to use one strand of lights to decorate a tree that was much taller than I had anticipated. The branches weren't having any of my ideas, and finally, Rachel decided we needed to just wrap the trunk with lights.
So the trunk looks really great. The rest of the tree...well...the trunk looks really great.
We also had a ream of red velvet ribbon that I originally thought would be nice to wrap around the tree, with the lights. Until my failed lighting changed my mind. But Rachel's an expert bow-maker, so she just made a lot of red bows that I spread around the tree. The final bow she made a little bigger, and it acts as the tree topper, since we had nothing else. This may be my favorite feature of the tree - the top branch is really tall, and when Rachel connected the bow to it, she could only reach the tippy-top (we were bending the tree to get it to her while she stood on a chair, so she didn't have much placement option. So when she got it secured and we stood to look at it, it looked a wee bit ridiculous - kind of like Cindy Lou Who, with her bow at the very tip-top of her hair. I busted a gut from that, and Rachel and I were close to tears while a few other co-workers, who had thought it prudent to stand and watch us work on the tree without participating in the decorations, stood a foot behind us, wondering why we were in charge of decorating the poor tree (if they would've jumped in, it could've maybe looked better! Though I doubt it....).
After recovering myself from the awesome tree-topper, I went back to my desk to unwrap some of the ornaments. I looked at the tree again and realized the top was just high enough that it was in the path of the air coming from the vent at the top of the wall nearby - so the bow and top of the tree were just hanging out, bobbing to the song in their minds. It successfully secured a smile on my face the rest of the day.
The next day, I spent a little while placing the ornaments on the tree, hoping to fill in some of the gaps that were everywhere. I soon realized, though, that this was an impossible task. The tree was just too blasted sparse. And some of the ornaments were too heavy for the weak branches, so I had to hang them up close to the trunk - which was still effective in taking up some space. Plus, it gives it some texture and dimension, right? Anyway...I've got some favorite ornaments, like the squirrel made of clay, or the paper surfer contained in the little plastic condiment container, or the bear made out of colored pieces of plastic.
I also hung our mini stockings on the tree, each with a name of a staff member on it. Derek had a great idea to make little roll-ups of bills, with their names on them, to hang on the tree, too. I made one and it was ugly, so I stuck in a stocking and never returned to the idea again.
I was pretty proud of my handiwork on that tree - but it's still pathetic and ugly. Here's the final shot of it:
The Congressman came in yesterday and commented on how pathetic our tree was, and then just laughed. I think he kind of likes it, despite the pathetic nature of it's appearance. But there are so many other, better trees from California, that we're all a bit surprised that this was what we got. But it's got character and spunk, and if it would drink the water in the stand, then it might also last for 2 more weeks, before we send it away again.
And that, my friends, is our giant Charlie Brown Christmas Tree. Pathetic, but lovable. Sad, but happy. Ugly, but...festive-ish. Great (and/or horrible), right?!
No comments:
Post a Comment