Dec 8, 2021 3 min read

Have you finished decorating for the Christmas holiday yet?

I put up my outside lights the day before Thanksgiving when the weather was still fairly mild but still couldn’t bring myself to turn on the lights or put up my tree until after turkey day. Now you have to realize that my decorating involves minimal time and effort, and my outdoor lights involve pretty much wrapping a few strands of lights around the porch railings. Simple but pretty.

Decorating for the holidays is fun though never as much fun since my mom passed away. She used to go all out taking down other décor and replacing it with greenery, bows, bulbs, snowmen and angels everywhere. I used to decorate more but have pared it down bit by bit each year. Now, I have it down to where I simply put up a few wreaths outside, wrap the lights around the banister, put up my tree and add in pieces from my snowman collection here and there around the house. I don’t have to remove any other knickknacks as everything can just sort of fit in with what’s already there. The snowmen can stay out all winter and the wreath on the door gets replaced by a wooden snowman sign. I call it minimalist effort.

I finally put up the tree the other day and it only took about a half-hour from start to finish. The previous tree was something called a pencil tree and was fairly slim standing about 5 feet tall. I’d had it since the mid-1990s, and it served me well folding up and popping in and out of a manageable-sized box all of these years. The past few years, though, I noticed how many of the fake needles were left in the box after I assembled it and how piles and piles of them were on the carpeting and tree skirt. Last year, I’d finally had enough of the decaying fake tree and donated it to charity instead of storing it in my garage.

I finally got smart and bought a new pre-lit tree that was delivered to my door. This year, it made decorating even easier with simply popping the new tree in the stand and plugging in the cord. It works! Then I looked outside and realized that several of the bulbs in the lights on my strands around the banister are not lit. I could have sworn they were all on when I tested them. The rest of the lights still work, so I’m not sure if I’ll even mess with them.

The only way I could make decorating even easier is to do what a family friend used to do: They had an enormous house and would simply put a bed sheet over their fully decorated tree and move it into the attic until the next Christmas. But where’s the fun in that?

Kristin Emery can be reached at kristinemery1@yahoo.com.