a longer video

IF this will load from Flickr, this is a longer video featuring more of the vintage-y ornaments I have, including my old Russ brand alicorn and white reindeer from the antique mall in Sherman:

(Video is not quite 4 minutes and covers some of the same ground as the previous one, but with more detail and more ornaments)



Yes, more of the My Little Ponies, but I really love having them. And Hello Kitty.

Also, today, I bought some vintage-y ornaments from an Etsy seller. They had a few of the old, old glass ones like some that came from my grandparents, but I don't want to trust the mail, so I just ordered plastic or other unbreakable ones.

One is a sequinned bell very much in the 1970s style; I kind of love those ornaments. Both because they are sparkly, because I like sparkly things and it reminds me of my childhood. And yes, I will find room for them on the tree; I can always find more room for them.

It's made me a lot happier than I would expect, having the tree up and having the ornaments. Even if I had a few sniffly moments putting it up - I remember when we were kids, the way we did trees; the tree was always a live tree, and for a few years when we were young we would go with another family to a tree farm to get them...it was quite an experience, there were horse drawn sledges to drag the trees back (there was snow, or at least every year we went there was snow) and they'd hand off saws to the people (usually the dads) who were going to do the cutting, and then we'd drive back with the tree in the back of my dad's field van. (I cannot remember now if we crammed both trees in there, or if our friends also had a big car that they fit the tree in)

And then, we'd put it up. Usually let it sit for a day so it could "relax" (I have no idea if that was a real thing, or a way of delaying for us kids).

Then the lights. My dad would do the lights, stretching the strands (multicolored lights, the size that used to be called C7, and many of them were the random twinkle lights. (I guess you can buy C7 sized LED bulbs, now).

I have tiny bulbs on my tree - they are LED because those have a long life and draw less power and don't get hot so I feel okay leaving them on when I'm not home. Mine are multicolor, and that's because that's what we had when I was a kid. And the set I have now does have some random-blinking bulbs, which is a nice callback to my childhood.

Then we'd hang the ornaments. Like on my tree, they were a big mixture of old and new. Some glass balls, some of those satin balls that look good until they snag on something. Lots of figural ornaments, both the thin glass kind and chunkier ones (plastic, or there are a few wooden ones that were bought at a crafts show somewhere when I was a small child - a Winnie-the-Pooh knockoff, and a wooden cookie-cutter doll with a cloth dress, and a hickory-dickory-dock clock with a tiny mouse on it, and even a few very heavy ceramic ones made by a friend of the family).

My father was very precise about hanging the ornaments. I remember getting annoyed as a tween and young teen about how much direction he would give us as to where they "should" be hung - no ornament could touch the branch below it, and two of the same color could not be too close to each other.

I'm less picky about the "touching a lower branch" (some of my ornaments are big, a few are heavy) but I do try to spread the colors out. I have a lot of red-and-white ones (as you can see in the video) but that's partly because they're widely available. I have a few copper colored balls, and a few gold and white ones (again, in imitation of the old Shiny Brites; they are painted in bands). I also have a lot of pink ornaments - I just like pink, and I guess it was kind of a popular mid-century Christmas color, along with turquoise or teal to take the place of green, and one of the ornaments I ordered is a pink one. I don't really care about "color matching" or "does it clash" on a tree. I knew people growing up who had "themed" trees every year, or picked A Color for their trees to be done in and....well, either they bought new ornaments every year or maybe even back them renting decorations was a thing? These were people financially more well-off than my family and with different attitudes....in my family, the big thing was getting to see the beloved old ornaments from previous years again.

We also didn't have tinsel on the tree after one year my mom caught one of the cats (I don't remember if it was Cleo or Patty) - eating the tinsel because it, uh....came through into the cat box. She realized that could pose quite a threat (friends of theirs almost lost a cat to an intestinal blockage caused by string) so the next year my dad bought a bunch of long, icicle-shaped ornaments to replace the tinsel.

And so, I have some icicles - from Target a few years back - on my tree. And also some icicles I made based on an idea in an old Better Homes and Gardens craft magazine. I do like them better than tinsel now and it is easier to un-trim the tree. (Of course, with live trees, the tinsel more or less just goes out with the tree - which is less good for chipping/mulching or decomposition, I suppose).

So a lot of my "aesthetic" choices are made because they are what my family did. (I know newly-formed couples who have argued over "white lights vs. colored lights"). I do have more ridiculous cartoon-character type ornaments, or ornaments about which someone might protest "but that's not Christmas!" (like the hammerhead shark) but I just like them. And they were sold as tree ornaments. And they do have glitter or sequins on them.