"It's So Tinsel!"

Finally, it was time! I slept until 8:30, ate breakfast and walked the dog, and commenced to tree assembly and then decoration. Snowy played supervisor as I stacked the tiers of the tree and plugged each in, sighed in relief when each lighted, snaked an extension cord down the "trunk" of the tree so I could plug in the star, and then started to apply decorations, old in the back, large everywhere first, to be filled in with smaller ones. This year I did not put the Hallmark "twelve days of Christmas" ornaments on the tree. We have half of them now, and I bought the metal display tree a couple of years back. We have one more bird to go, the swans a'swimming, and then I will note with interest when we leave the birds and start with the humans. This set has made the number five not "rings" as in the kind you wear on your fingers but as ringneck pheasants; this is a theory about the song is that the "five golden rings" were golden ringneck pheasants, which were known as "rings" in the era the song was conceived. (It's not, as some people say, about the Bible. It's a song to be sung at a game, back from the days when that was part of the Christmas celebration, not watching football on TV or playing on your iPad.)

The tinsel, as always, took the longest. I always want to get that perfect waterfall effect, like ice flowing down the tree. It's made harder by the fine icicles that they make today. The version through the late 60s (when they replaced lead foil tinsel with the mylar stuff) through the 1990s was thick enough that I could remove it after Christmas and keep about three quarters of it. The new stuff is almost as fine as angel hair, and if you remember that awful stuff, you also remember how it was prone to static electricity. At least it was cold today! The temperature was down in the 20s this morning. Last year it was so warm when I decorated the tree that I had to wear a glove to hold the tinsel because it was sodden with perspiration from my hand.

Once the manger figures were under the tree, I was done! "It's so tinsel!" as Lanny and Wayne the Christmas elves would say. I changed clothes quickly and took four of the five packages we need to mail (one has a missing part) to the post office to get them off. Remarkably, this only took about fifteen minutes. I'm going to quit going to the PO when it opens!

I'd only eaten oatmeal, yogurt, a piece of bread and three glasses of milk all day, so Uncle Maddio's Pizza was a welcome supper! Then we went to Sprouts and then to Publix. We just need milk and eggs and "plastic cheese"—which we can get at Costco tomorrow.

So nice to blog by the glow of the tree...