Christmas Trees--heavy decorations or no?

I myself prefer a lightly decorated tree, and so does my husband. I grew up with a very heavily decorated one, but as I got older, my need for massive decoration abated.

We just put up our tree today. It’s got some tinsel garland, some beaded garland, and some red bows on it. No lights, but that’s only because the lights we have aren’t working. We’ll get new lights after I get paid, because even though we don’t like heavy decoration, we do like lights.

How about you?

My tree looks like i just poured 26 years of decorations onto it. :smiley:
I love it.
I have seen a lot of trees not heavily decorated that are beautiful.

I usually put a lot of decorations on my tree, but a couple of years ago I decorated it with 500 (on a four foot tree this is the least amount acceptable to me) white lights, about 100 poinsettias and some gold garland. I liked it . I love lots of lights.

This year I’m not sure if I’ll put one up or not, if I do it will be very small.

I see other people with lightly decorated trees, and I’m struck by how lovely they look. I could never manage this personally, we have tons of ornaments and I love them all equally and when I am done, you can barely see the tree itself.

When I first opened the thread, I thought “heavy decorations” was going to be about ornaments that are heavy – I have noticed that more and more, it is hard to find lightweight ornaments for the tree. Possibly more people have artificial trees, that will support heavier ornaments? It peeves me to no end when I see an ornament that I just love, and then pick it up to discover it’s made of cast iron or something.

The tree at my mom’s house looks like someone dipped it into a vat of macaroni, glitter, and dried play-dough. It’s absolutely drenched in every home-made ornament any of her six kids ever brought home. We make fun of her every year, but in a way it’s nice to see them come out of storage each holiday.

This year is the first time I’ve decorated a full-size tree of my own and I went the other direction. White lights, silver tinsel, blue and silver balls, a handful of white poinsettieas, and a silver bow with trailing ribbons to top it off. Simple, but I’m really impressed with how nicely it turned out. I bet if my mom saw it, she’d make fun of me. :slight_smile:

I occasionally look at the lightly decorated, nicely themed trees I see around and think “I should do that”. But even now, at the ripe ol’ age of 32, I have enough of my own ornaments that all have meaning to me, and I couldn’t bear to not put them all up simply because they didn’t match the theme or because the tree was getting too cluttered. IMO, the most beautiful tree is the one drenched in meaning and memories.

I guess we’re in the lightly decorated category. Last year’s tree had a red and white theme: white lights, red satin bulbs and candy canes.

This year, we’re going with red, matte silver and muted gold bulbs and these adorable paper, gift-shaped ornaments we scored at Ikea. Although we’ll try the white lights, I think we’ll end up buying red lights this year.

I’m fairly lightly decorated. 6’ tree with one string of lights, a couple boxes of small bulb ornaments, some bows, and maybe 10 random other ornaments. It looks nice, and the actual “treeness” shows through. It also takes a lot less time to decorate!

It took me three days to put up my tree. It’s eight feet tall and has about 1600 white lights on it. Then, the strands of gold beads and pearls. After that, poinsettias, either gold or pink. Then all my ornaments, which are all either gold, silver, pink, or crystal…mostly crystal, and mostly dangly things that weigh down the branches. Then icicles. Then gold balls to fill in whatever space is left. I skipped the ribbon this year, but usually there’s gold ribbon running down it too.

It’s hell and a half to take it down.

I do get it honestly, though, from my mom. It was her stupid idea to have a Victorian Christmas tree, anyway, and now my tree just looks sad if I don’t do all that.

There are two rules of Christmas tree decoration.

  1. Every branch must have at least something on it. Large branches may support several somethings.

  2. The tree must be bright enough to read by when all lights are off.

Of the two, I adhere much more strictly to the latter. With my current tree it’s also much easier - it’s vintage late-50s, 6’, and aluminum. I bought at a flea market in Alameda. Only takes two or three 100-bulb light sets (all white, of course).

When I was using natural trees, I used multicolored lights, and a lot of them - I think a 6’ tree took about 600 -700 or so.

Our tree is fairly lightly decorated and looks, even though I say so myself, quite tasteful. And I hate it.

I want snowmen, robins, glittery baubles, snowy-roofed houses, plastic Santies, multi-coloured lights that have ten settings and play annoying Christmas tunes, tinsel in every shade imaginable and loads of cheap spray-on snow. And that’s just for starters. I’m buying a couple of bits of cheap crap every year so that my wife doesn’t notice our tree gradually degenerating into the travesty of bad taste I remember so fondly from my childhood. I’m going to enlist our daughter’s help as she gets older (she’s only six months at the moment) - kids understand that kind of thinking.

Watch out, Mrs. MWAP, Christmas is coming and it doesn’t have velvet bows and gold ribbons.

We have a seven foot tree.
We put 2100 mini white lights on it (took a full day and four extension cords) and close to 500 solid red balls and about 60 white satin balls.

I don’t know if there is any correlation, but I have noticed that since we started lighting it at night, Southwest, American and JAL has been flying directly over our house during landing approach.

We use a LOT of lights, and quite a few ornaments - but we do some culling every year and some rotation. Not too many kids’ efforts make the cut. So I’d figure ours is somewhere in the middle, leaning towards heavily decorated.

On the topics of lights, we decided to only put lights on one tree out front. But, you could read a newspaper by that one tree!

My step-MIL has got one of the most heavily laden and IMO gaudiest trees I’ve ever seen. She collects Radko, and the tree is completely coated with them. They are so large, that they drape on the outside more than hang freely. I did a very rough calculation last year, and estimated that it was an easy $15G of ornaments. Can you say ostentatious?

In deference to these latest posts, allow me to revise my description of “fairly lightly decorated” to “bare-ass naked!”

In our household, simple is better. We always had balsam fir trees. I think they smell the best. Long needled pines just look wrong.

Small lights are preferable to large ones and some should blink so when all the household lights are turned off you can watch the patterns on the ceiling.

Most of the decorations are have special significance and are old glass or wooden ones. There is a very strong tradition of how to decorate the tree. You could probably take pictures of the four women’s trees in my family and not be able to tell them apart! A bittersweet time of year.

perhaps multiple trees?

some people i know have a “company” tree in the parlour, and a “family” tree in the rec. room.

those of you with tyklets have you thought of a wee tree in their bedrooms? a small little artificial could brighten up a room and spread out the sentimental favourites.

When I got the tree box* out of the crawl space this year, I saw that I’d left a note to myself on the side about some ornaments that needed repair. I set them aside, then sorted the others by category. I realized that some of these ornaments, I just did not care for, so I put them on another sideline.

Meanwhile, Mr. Rilch was putting on the lights. We have two of those strings with the eight settings, one of Snoopy, and one of pumpkins, which has been rigged up to accomodate an Enterprise and a shuttlecraft. The Enterprise has active lights, and the shuttlecraft talks in Spock’s voice when you push a button. Why yes, we are geeks. We also have the Borg cube, but that’s just an ornament that doesn’t do anything. Anyway, he added a thick garland to all of this, then turned the reins over to me.

After I’d put up the ornaments I did like**, I fixed all but one of the damaged ornaments. A bird was falling out of its nest; Flying Santa had lost his trapeze, and the strawberry phosphate was falling out of its glass. Also, Gandalf the Red*** lost his staff while I was unpacking him. Superglue took care of all of these, and tomorrow I will borrow Friend’s acrylic paint so I can give the gumdrop bear his eyes back.

Today, I took the unwanted ornaments to the Salvation Army. They’re good ornaments, mostly fake-pewter; perhaps someone else will care for them more than I. Then I went across the street to the hardware store, where they were having a 30% off sale on ornaments, and got eight little aluminum baubles, two with reflectors. Very classy.

So our tree is pretty thick with decorations, but I wouldn’t say cluttered. Also, I like that we have lights in many colors, but no green. Makes it look more like an ornament itself.

*Let’s see…try to find a decent live tree in Southern California, get it home without getting your car too scratched up, haul it up the stairs, water it and sweep up its needles for weeks, and live with the risk of fire hazard? Or take a box out of the crawl space and a tree out of the box, then reverse after New Years’? You can get all kinds of pine fragrances.

**I made sure to distribute them evenly. Six wooden stars on six different “sides” of the tree: two high, two midway, two low. And like that.

***Not associated with Tolkien or New Line. He’s actually a pre-Coca-Cola Father Christmas. I didn’t know that when I bought him, years ago; I just saw a voluminous beard and wooden staff and said, “Gandalf the Red”.

I like to be able to see the tree, since we pay out the wahzoo for a nice live one every year. One string of white lights, one star for the top and some ornaments. We have a toy theme. Most of the ornaments are miniature tin toys and Classic WtP etc. We do have some grown up ornaments (the Tiffany snowflake is my fav) at the very top where the kids can’t reach.

We make my dad let us cut down one of his cherished trees from the back acre. I don’t believe in doing the tree too soon, so ours won’t go up until this weekend.

Anyway I’m all for sentimental trees. None of our ornaments match, and that’s the way I like it. They all mean something, from the blobby painted ball to the Santa Kermit. I’d say it comes out medium-decorated; you can see a lot of tree, but it’s not naked.

lovelyluka , we when I was a kid we had a tree like yours. I had my electric train going around it with cotton around the base. Of course the presents were under the tree also. The tree was decorated with tinsel, bulbs, lights, popcorn, and whatever else the parents would let us do. And of course the angel on the top of the tree.

Merry Christmas!

John