Thinking Thursdays: The Christmas tree

It has been a busy week, and I think its going to stay busy for the rest of the month.  Christmas is coming, along with the resulting slew of activities and shopping trips (its even busier since most of my friends are teachers and are only free to meet up in December!), and the hubby will be away for the next few weekends (thanks to either calls, or camps).

This year, we wanted to set up and decorate the Christmas tree.  It has always been a childhood dream of mine to be able to dress up the tree every year, however, I've only been able to do that twice in my entire life.  The first was when my parents gave in to my pleas and bought the tree when I was around 8.  After that Christmas, my mum kept the tree, and thanks to her very pragmatic nature, she decided the tree was a dust magnet, and not worth the trouble to set up.

The tree disappeared under their bed for a few years, until one day I decided that I would surprise my parents by setting it up when they were out.  I dragged it out from under the bed, dislodging a few years worth of dustballs in the process, set it up, and even managed to transform the decorations to fit a blue and silver theme by wrapping some of the baubles in aluminum foil...  Needless to say I was very proud of my efforts, but my mum wasn't impressed (and very discomfited by all the dust balls I had unearthed, along with the now empty roll of aluminum foil in the kitchen!).

So that tree has been banished again under their bed, until they passed it to us when I moved to my own place after getting married.  We wanted to set it up last year, but we were so busy we didn't have the time (plus I was 8 months pregnant then, so it would have been hard to dress the tree with all the branches poking my belly!).

Last week, we went to Ikea to search for decorations since the ones I had were over 20 years old (not vintage, rather, think dusty and cracked), only to find that only the black-coloured baubles were left.  We then went to the other Ikea branch on Tuesday in the hope that it still had decorations, but it was the same.  Only black, which doesn't seem to be an ideal colour unless you are part of the cast for The Devil Wears Prada or The Matrix.  So we drove down to Vivocity (which co-incidentally had this ginormous tree to mock my efforts) to see if Daiso had suitable decorations, but I couldn't find anything suitable, and what was nice, was scratched.  So I've given up on trying to set up the tree this year.  Perhaps next year, but this post by another mum makes me think the tree might never see the light of day again!