... Christmas?!!

Yesterday I pulled out the box of decorations and got out the Christmas stuff. I started decorating and when U came home from work we went Christmas tree shopping. We quickly discovered it was both easier and more difficult than we had expected. Easier in that there were more stores selling trees than U had thought and more difficult because more choice made the actual choosing more difficult as we became very picky very quickly.

Height - We knew we wanted something big enough to be a focal point in the room and that could be surrounded by gifts - so at least 150 cm but ideally 180.

Shape - After turning down all the options available at Tokyu Hands we finally realized they were all "slim" trees. They just didn't seem right. I guess the slender trees take up less space and thus are better in small Japanese homes, but they just looked spindly - not in a pathetic Charlie Brown tree type way, just... wrong... But since your average Westerner is wider than their Japanese counterpart I suppose it makes sense? ;)

Fashion - Not only could we choose between ones with pine cones, or brown artfully mixed in among the green on the branches, but there was a "Great Canadian Pine" and little ones with glowing branches. Then there was the choice between a set or a "nude" tree. The idea of a tree that comes with all the decorations seems wrong to me as I remember my mum buying me a decoration every year and we still have the dry pasta angel I made in second grade and the baked clay wreath I made years before that! So nude it is.

And the verdict?

After tramping around the shopping mall for a few hours and looking at a couple dozen trees we couldn't make up our mind and decided we didn't like anything we saw. So we put it off until next week... but did buy a bunch of decorations and a few more Christmas gifts!