Enormous Balls

We decked the halls the other day. There's a wreath on the front door, some new lights around the front entry, and new "candles" in the upstairs windows. I always wanted some of those dorky candles but I'd never gotten around to getting any. The opportunity presented itself when I had to make an emergency run to the hardware store for a new string of outdoor lights since the ones that had been stored away last year were toast. The battery-powered “candles” are crappy looking if you actually look at them but from a distance, like from the road looking at the house, they look great and have an eerily realistic flicker.

And the tree is up. After my husband and I got the lights on, the girl helped me hang the ornaments. This meant that we completely forgot the glass beads, and the ornaments were allocated without much regard to let's finish one box before we start the next, shall we? As a result, there are several half full boxes back down in the cellar, because I have more ornaments than tree. I’d have done it differently, but hey. She’s nine. She was having a good time.

Because I'm me, I narrated the history and provenance of nearly every ornament.

• Aw, Granny bought this at Martin Viette's, it was a fund-raiser.
• This box came from my grandmother, look, here's her handwriting on it.
• Look, it's a pickle! Look, it's another piece of cheese! Look, it's a potato!
• Pinky gave this red one to me.
• I love this really old one even though it's broken.
• Here’s the box of the really big balls that Daddy's mother brought back from Poland.

While I tend to contemplate the appropriate placement of each and every ornament, small and antique up high, large and less fragile down low, really heavy ones on a sturdy branch, the girl was kind of hither and yon. One thing lead to another and I found myself saying hey, that enormous Polish ball is too close to the floor, and somehow from there I ended up teaching her "do your balls hang low?" It may be our new Christmas-tree-decorating anthem.