O Tannenbaum

This year I wrote “Christmas Tree” on the December 10 date of the calendar next to the thermostat. A convenient Saturday close, but not too close, to Christmas. That way I wouldn’t be pestered by Lilly into getting one earlier. She pestered me anyway, but I referred her to the calendar.

And so the 10th came and didn't pass without a visit to the tree lot at the corner of Wise and Roselle here in greater suburbia. Sales of the trees benefit people who say the sales benefit Boy Scouts, or something like that. I went by myself. Lilly might have come, but she was busy watching a DVD of Cinderella, which she herself had picked out at Netflix and advanced to the top of the list. Disney Princesses form a subkingdom in the Empire of the Mouse, and its attraction for eight-year-old girls is strong indeed.

But I have to add that there’s more to her video habits than Disney. I put The Best of John Belushi on the Netflix queue recently, and Lilly not only watched it with me, but asked to see it again. “He’s weird,” she said with obvious delight. I’d done my fatherly duty for the day, introducing my daughter to “Little Chocolate Donuts.” (I wasted some time looking into it, and oddly enough that skit premiered 20 years to the day before Lilly was born.)

Speaking of Belushi, the tree-lot attendant last year resembled him in some ways, at least the unkempt Bluto Blutarsky of Animal House, though I doubt that he had the same range of facial expressions. This year the attendant was leaner and more clean-cut, and even helped me load the tree into the back of the van. Got a fairly fresh tree this year, with a good smell and a flat side.

Every year, Lilly takes over more of the decorating, and this year was no exception. I still do the lights. We had to replace a string, so that delayed things for a little while. It used to be—and I’m old enough to remember a string of lights like this, which we used into the ’70s—one goes out, they all go out. Now, the whole string simply fails after a few years.

Most of the glass ornaments went toward to top, to prevent Ann from knocking them off. But that’s really last year’s worry. She’s a more sophisticated toddler now, not (much) given to aimless thrashing around. Instead, she wants to take them down to look at them, and sometimes she takes them away for play, which can be just as dangerous to a breakable ornament as a random knock. Today I discovered that she’d moved a chair next to the tree to exam higher-up ornaments, something I discouraged, but I don’t think I’ve seen the last of it.