The Christmas Tree

Decorated Christmas trees are one of my favourite things about Christmas.  They are like snow flakes; each unique.  Every one is a creative expression.  They are all inspired by different motivations and even if they aren't my cup of tea decoration wise, they are all beautiful.

My Christmas tree grows with me every year.  I've been decorating this tree for 25 years and while some things are inviolate and must remain, others have morphed and changed as the decorations age and my ornament collection grows or things break. (It's always a little soul wrenching when something breaks.  Especially if it's my fault the item broke.) My tree is an homage to my Christmas history, my favourite Christmas tree accoutrements, and a physical talisman of family and friends. 

It starts with the lights.  My lights are from 1995.  They are the old Noma electric opaque Christmas bulbs. These are the same kind of lights that have been on  my family's Christmas tree since the early 70s. Now they are considered "retro" and they come in special packaging and are twice the price of the ordinary ones.  

One of the most vivid Christmas memories I have is setting up the Christmas tree with my Dad.  I don't remember him wrangling the tree into the stand, I don't really remember even buying the tree, but once it was up my dad and I would string the light wire from the front hall where the Christmas tree stood through the living area, into the dining room and screw in each bulb.  At that time, if one bulb went dead, the whole string wouldn't light up.  So you had to lay the long strand out and make sure that every bulb worked.  Once we confirmed every bulb worked, Dad would slowly drag the long light strand towards the tree, nimbly wrapping it around the base and then continuing on, spiraling up the tree until he reached the point on top.  Magic!

For 20 years I searched for tin light reflectors. My grandmother put them on her lights and my mum inherited a few.  I loved the way the reflector turned each Christmas bulb into a sparkling flower.  My quest remained just that until 4 years ago, Michaels sold them one Christmas season in a tribute to  "vintage Christmas".  I actually shrieked with excitement in the store.  Now I have an homage to my grandmother and beautiful sparkling lights on my tree.  

Next comes the tinsel and ribbon.  I'm a gold tinsel garland girl myself.  Some swear by the strands of silver tinsel.  We tried that one year and I swore never again.  It takes a long time to lay each strand perfectly for maximum effect and the stuff gets everywhere. I would find it in bedrooms, behind the toilet, it would migrate all over the house.

My ribbon is a red plaid.  There is something very Christmassy about a red plaid.

Now I feel ready to decorate.  My husband always looks at me like I'm crazy.  "Haven't you been decorating?" he asks with a shake of his head.  Potato, tomato.

I love, LOVE, a Christmas tree decoration.  Finding the perfect one is so satisfying.  Seeing ornaments that have been with me forever is like a warm hug.  It provides fresh joy every time I see it and provides all the lovely memories associated with it's inception and continued existence.

We had a lot of single colour balls on our tree growing up. When I got my first tree the first thing I did was go out to the Hudson's Bay and get a huge selection of single coloured balls; red, blue, gold, green, I even found purple.  You can't find them like that anymore.  They shatter if you drop them but they don't feel like glass. Those where always the filler.  The problem became that after a while I didn't need filler. Now they are a delight in their own right.  

Taking a picture of one of these ornaments is challenging.  You can always see your camera reflected in their surface.

Hudson's Bay used to have a section called Christmas Street.  They would set up 10 to 15 trees and decorate them with all kinds of amazing ornaments and then all the ornaments that were on those trees would be sitting on hooks on the wall beside the tree. Some of the ornaments were decorated balls, breathtaking, some where clever ornaments. I could spend years pouring over each tree, admiring each decoration, trying to decide if there were any that I could not leave the store without.  Sadly today, there is no more Hudson's Bay Christmas Street.  But I did find a version at Garden Works.  Their trees are beautiful.  I also have found ornaments at HomeSense, Target, and Canadian Superstore. There was also this magnificent Christmas store in Victoria where I spent a lot of money.  Sadly it too is no longer. I've even found ornaments on vacation.  I was in this hole in the wall store in Jerome Arizona (a very cool town built on the side of a hill) and found this spicy guy. 

Unwrapping each ornament, I am reminded of where I got it, or who gave it to me or why I have it. One of my best friends gave me this flying squirrel that always sits pride of place.  We don't live close, but every Christmas when I decorate the tree I think of her and smile and bask in her love for me.

 Some ornaments make me laugh, some make me cry.  I've got this weird, heavy, but beautiful Turkish ornament that hangs because my mum brought it home from a visit to Turkey.  My husband and I spent part of our honeymoon in Turkey. An ornament will bring up a happy memory that triggers another happy memory and they all tumble around in my brain like clothes in a dryer. 

Once you've got everything dangling from the tree the final piece de resistance is the tree topper.  I grew up with a very simple angel made of straw.  She didn't have a face, but her body was dyed a lush burgundy.  And I can't remember if she had wings.  My brother has since inherited it because I found one with the same vibe. But until I found that angel a giant elf sat on the top of my tree.  I found him at a craft fair.  Now he sits hidden inside the tree.

When I started out, I looked for the familiar.  What did I love about my family's tree?  And could I recreate it for my own?  And then slowly my life took over the tree.  It became a repository of items reflecting the Christmases that inspired me,  the people I love, the people my husband loves, the places I'd been and the family memories we'd made.  

I think I need a bigger tree

The details of my tree matter a great deal to me.  However the details of a tree don't really matter.  The most important part is that whomever decorated the tree made the effort.  And for that I am very grateful.

 

Posting Photos

I love Instagram because it's so immediate.  Click and post and voila you've managed to entertain friends and family while immortalizing a moment in time.  I've yet to venture into a public Instagram account.  I need to research how you separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of true followers.  

The problem is my inner critic.  When he gets a hold, I don't post nothin'. 

He hijacked this blog for a while which would account for the year long furlough.  

I love a great photo.  I love taking a great photo.  And I love posting fantastic photos on Instagram.  I'm just not sure everyone wants to see them.  When I get on a photographic role and it's going well, I could easily post five or six pictures a day.  Many of them would be food related, tons of my kids and the nature surrounding me.  My horizons are a wee bit limited.  Well they are and they’re not.  I have this wonderful life, And sometimes I compare.

Also, I think these photos are good.  I'm not sure they really are.  I am a noob photographer.  My good pictures are lucky pictures.  No matter how many times I read about it, I have no idea how to control the outcome of my photos when it involves exposure and aperture.  I can't even spell aperture.  And don't get me started on focal length.  I'm bound and determined to figure it out.  The going is slow.

But I realized that I had unfettered access to a fabulous place to post photos.  Right here! So tonight when I figured out I could upload photos to the cloud and then grab them from my phone to post them on Instagram I decided I'd post more of them here along with their story, how I got them and most importantly with no inner critic on either the photo or the content.

So here goes:

Bird Butts

There are a series of electric wires that cross a portion of my back yard along the alley.  In the spring they attract a lot of birds.  These birds poop.  These birds sit on these wires and poop on my fence.  they also poop on my garbage bins, and if my car is parked outside, on that too.  This is the first time I have been able to grab a photo of them.  It was the wrong angle so all I got was their butts.  And this was the best my zoom lens could do.  However, you can vaguely distinguish their little tale feathers and you get the idea. I really love that the sun is glinting of the one on the top left.  These aren't big birds. But they are poop machines.

Next:

the last key lime tart

I was grocery shopping and needed some tart shells.  I blindly grabbed some only to discover, once I got home, that they were sweetened tart shells.  Currently you can't return groceries, so I was stuck with sweetened tart shells, but my plan was to make mini quiches.  They languished in my freezer for a while until the next grocery shop where I picked up a box of key lime pie filling.  And the rest is dessert tart history.  I also bought 2% milk instead of whipping cream.  In my defense the packaging on both looks the same.  Fortunately, I had some whipping cream dregs left, that had not gone sour and was just enough to make 24 little dollops of whip cream; and now the rest is dessert tart history.

This was the last tart.  I photographed this sucker nine thousand times adjusting the ISO, the exposure, the focal length. No luck.  Then my husband suggested I use a flash and presto:  Magic.

Number 3:

Zoomed in on our peekaboo view during sunset.  I even got birds

I cheated with this photo.  I zoomed in on the peekaboo view from the front of our house.  It looks magnificent but it isn't that big.  Normal settings not involving zoom do not capture the detail.  Plus, I managed to get some birds flying by and a little pink from the sunset. Worth it!

My biggest challenge:

Evening light

When the sun sets in my neighborhood, especially in the spring, there is this golden glow that bathes certain trees and buildings.  It's phenomenal.  And I am forever trying to capture it in a picture.  And, I am forever failing.  This was the closest I've gotten.

One of my faves:

Granola, yogurt and fruit sauce

I''m really proud of this picture for several reasons.  One, I made the granola and the fruit compote.  I have lots of frozen fruit and if you throw it in a pot it reduces down and I can mash everything up and then strain out the seeds.  So maybe this is more of a sauce.  No, fruit gravy!  Yes,  I made the fruit gravy.  I also made the granola.  I am an old hat at granola now.  But it still thrills me to bits that I can make it.  If you'd like to see how I started please click here.   And I took the picture and it came out beautifully if I do say so myself.  Everything glistens, the fruit swirl is distinct and the granola is included but visible in the picture.  My only frustration is I housed it all in a really old bowl.  My yogurt, fruit and granola is housed in the equivalent of dish sweats.  sigh!  Next time.

And that concludes today's photo journal.  I really appreciate that I've found a place to post and say " Look!  Look what I did!" and I feel thrilled about it.

Binge worthy TV Part 1

I am often late to the party.  In this instance I discovered an amazingly binge worthy tv show that have ended their run.  I'm so grateful I got to see such creative awesomeness and I'm frustrated because I do not have the power to keep these shows going.

My first foray into lose yourself completely, forget the world exists, holy smokes coming up for air makes me dizzy, was the television show Newsroom. Here's the back story: I finally took the plunge and traded my kids channels subscription for an HBO and crave subscription.  It took me three years longer than it should have to do this.  My kids have not sat down and watched a children's television show for an embarrassingly long time but I held on to those channels because they embodied memories. I also always wanted shows like this when I was a kid and I fulfilled that fantasy for a good long while.

So now entering the wonderful world of  adult entertainment I began looking for shows I'd heard about but hadn't been able to watch.  And along came a little gem from Aaron Sorkin.  This man!  This man has my utmost respect.  He is a genius story teller who weaves current events and over the top dramatic personal experiences with humor, grace, wit, style and panache.  I love everything he has done.  I cannot understand his critics.  He's brilliant.

The Newsroom is  3 seasons of brilliance.

Although I'm not sure you can call 6 episodes a season. I'm feeling my age when I have this discussion.  6 episodes used to be a mini series.  A prolonged made for TV movie-esk type of show that was an event.  A series was 26 episodes that ran all year from September to May.  Now you can pinpoint my demographic.

The Newsroom had interesting characters who knew their stuff, they were cleverly acted and had magnetic personalities.  There were fabulous parables and an underlying "Don Quixote" theme.  The idea that news was not about making money but about making the general public aware of important events and political, economic, environmental and social shifts; the idea that news anchors held the moral high ground and looked after the country's values; banging up against the need for funding and the dilemmas that need created.  And then you throw in personal drama - abracadabra it was MAGIC!

Educating and entertaining at the same time is one of Aaron Sorkin's very best gifts. My favorite bit in the whole series is when the financial reporter is educating the news director about the difference between a commercial bank and an investment bank, and Sorkin has woven this through the news' director's personal drama.  I am running out of ways to say this was so damn clever!

I couldn't get enough.  And then there was no more to have.  But I am so grateful to have gotten the chance to watch.  There is something very inspiring and motivating about watching really great work.  And really great teamwork makes me want to climb - I was going to write Mount Everest but I hear that's kind of gross now - makes me want to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. And that feeling is why I go searching for more.