You will take my tree and ornaments and presents when you pry them from my cold, dead hands and I will cut the bitch who gets between me and my stocking.
No tree, or at least not much of one. We have a tiny Charlie Brown Christmas tree we put up and a few other decorations, but with no kiddo for now, protecting a real tree from the cats would be too much of a hassle. Plus, we both work pretty long and hard at our respective careers, so there just isn’t a crapload of time for decking the halls, much less donning the gay apparel.
Ah, they might do nothing, I don’t know. If we put one up and they didn’t destroy the New Thing out of sheer joy and curiosity, it would be a household first.
I’ve had a real tree (and usually a few other Christmas decorations) every year of my adult life: living with roommates, living alone, married and childless and now with kids. Even living down here, I insist on getting a real tree.
No kids yet and we still love decorating for Christmas. I care more about it than my husband does, but he goes along with it and I know he enjoys coming home to a lit-up house and sitting in the family room with a twinkly tree beside us while we’re watching A Charlie Brown Christmas together. I put the outside lights up last weekend while it was insanely warm, and last night I set up the tiny fake tree in the family room. We may or may not get around to putting up our big tree this year - the room we want to put it in needs painting and we’re only halfway through, and we’re not going to try and paint around a decorated tree! I don’t have boxes and boxes of other decorations for the windows and mantels, and I don’t pull out a set of Christmas-patterned dishes and towels in December, either. Just the tree(s), some outdoor lights, and I swap out my egg Whisky for my Christmas egg Whisky. I can’t find any pictures online, but it’s the same little egg wearing a Santa hat. He sits on my stove through New Years.
Part of our fun at Christmas is that we collect Christmas ornaments when we travel, so every year, when we decorate our tree, we can giggle and chat about some of the wonderful memories we’ve made. Some of them are official ornaments, some of them are other mementos - the day he asked me to marry him, my Mom bought us champagne to celebrate, and I kept the cork and wrote the date on it, and it goes onto the tree every year. See, I’m smiling just thinking about it. Christmas is great!
As for the cats, my solution is to put a couple of hooks in the ceiling or walls and support the tree with some string or ribbon or fishing line. They could climb the tree and knock stuff off, but the tree won’t come crashing down. I make sure to use shatterproof ornaments, and I admit that I do start shifting them upward as I reassess the boys’ reach and desire for swattable shiny things.
Single; no kids.
I have a tree (I have a nice collection of vintage ShinyBrites). I decorate the mantel, and I usually have a small open house at which I trot out all the family heirloom crystal and silver.
I enjoy it.
UT
And I love bake pumpkin pie and serve it with coffee using the special christmas plates and mugs.
Oh, do they ever. My mother found at least 25 ornaments on the floor this morning alone. And it’s all from Annie.
Wouldn’t stop my family from putting up a tree, though. (We did have to move to generic ornaments instead of our old ones, though, which is a shame)
My cousins are childfree and have a cat, and they still put up a tree. They also put stockings – including one for the cat.
I’m very much a bah-humbug type, but The Druidess is more of a whole nine yarder. We’ll have a tree, presents, decorations…and I learned recently that we will be participating in something called an “angel tree”–needy children submit lists of things they’d like for Christmas, and those more fortunate provide them. Can’t really bah humbug that—actually sort of looking forward to it.
The wife and I celebrate Christmas as a gift-giving holiday. The Thais use New Year’s as their gift-giving season, and with so many Westerners over here, December is one big holiday month, especially since there are two other holidays in the month – king’s birthday (Dec 5) and Constitution Day (Dec 10).
However, we don’t do decorations of any kind. Even when I was in the US, I forwent that. Just can’t be arsed.
My parents still put up a tree now that we kids are out of the house, but they don’t put any decorations on it. They have two 3-year-old cats and they discovered that while one of them has weak back legs and can’t jump very well, she has very strong front paws and loves to climb the tree. We used to go into the living room and find a little furry face poking out of the top of the 6-foot tree. So they now put up a tree with no lights or anything for a few weeks a year just so this cat can climb it.
Yes, their cats are ridiculously spoiled. We passed around a Tupperware container during the Thanksgiving meal to slice pieces of our cornish hens to save for those bratty animals. But they’re a lot of fun.
Definitely the first option for me - fully decorated tree, stockings, lights around the big window and Christmas wreath on the front door. When we first met, my wife had a take-it-or-leave-it attitude about the holidays, but my unabashed enthusiasm has warmed her Grinchy little heart. As far as tree survival is concerned - this will be our cat’s first Christmas with us, so I’m hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.
We’re not childfree now, but we were for our first 13 years. We probably put up more decorations B.C. (Before Children) than A.F. (Anno Filios).
The whole nine yards, but only sometimes. We’re often not at home during the holidays, because I’m usually living in a foreign country and don’t usually have all of our household goods with us.
It so happens that this year, we did decorate the house (the company shipped virtually everything we own for us). We put the tree and the decorations up yesterday. The tree is running off a transformer, and I picked up some 220V for outside just today (to be installed tomorrow).
We leave for North America a week from today for the rest of the year. A lot of work for a week of enjoyment, but it goes a long way to making the house feel like ours. I think that – for this first year, at least – that feeling is more important than Christmas per se.
Nothing smells better and is more beautiful than a Christmas tree.