Joy

With the arrival of December my thoughts have turned to Christmas... well, not so much "turned" as "been forced off the road by the mad careening Christmas juggernaut". I put out my usual nativity, hung garlands of tinsel around my exploitation movie posters and my backlit picture of Johnny Cash flipping the bird, and put Sufjan Stevens' loopy Christmas carols on high rotation.


But when it came to the Christmas Tree, I decided I needed to go in a new direction. My minimalist, post-modern "tree" has over the years become stretched and tired, evolving from a funky spiral into an overgrown pencil shaving.





So I left it in the back of the cupboard, went down to The Reject Shop, and bought myself a new tree for $30. It's wretched, as you'd expect from a $30 tree. But I managed to make it a bit more interesting.





I've seen a couple of inverted trees in magazines, so I thought I'd give it a try. It's not as easy as it looks - you wouldn't believe how reliant the standard fake Christmas Tree is on gravity to hold itself together.






First I had to drill holes in the sections of the trunk and screw them together. Then I had to screw cuphooks into the base and hang the tree using rubber tap washers from the hook in the ceiling.





Still, the final result is fun and inexpensive and a little bit transgressive. Plus Santa can fit a lot of presents under it.