Christmas Trees

I was just reading some of my favorite blogs and aluminum Christmas trees seem to be a common theme. I love them, but they just seem to make too much of a statement for me. I'm going retro in a whole different way. We always buy a real tree, which my mother never did when I was growing up. I'm sure it's because she was convinced it would dry out and then the lights would start the whole thing afire. I swear you would think someone in my family died a horrible death. Among my mother's biggest fears were me living in an apartment with bars on the windows, a fire starting, and me burning to death because the firemen couldn't get in. Another was us kids wearing scarves while sledding because if they got caught on trees we would get strangled. She is still big on donating blood and coercing people into signing their organ donor cards. But, I digress. My retro Christmas tree came about inadvertently when we (and by "we" I really mean my husband) agreed to let the girls have colored lights on the tree. After that small step away from my notion of what constitutes good taste, I took a giant leap and bought that fat, fuzzy looking garland. The girls and I chose white, because of course it will look like tubes of snow resting on the branches. Indoors. In Southern California.