My Christmas tree

Well I thought I had the most amazing idea.... why not create a Christmas tree that reflected my blog?  Raining Cats and Dogs.....easy!  I don't think so!

I mentioned my idea to a friend who helped me last year with my holiday tree.  How quickly my mind forgot what a fiasco my Goddess Christmas tree, also a good idea at the time, had been last year.

Here is the deal.  My friend the holiday tree expert is visionary, artistic, and creative, but a perfectionist that must certainly have A.D.D.  He is  scattered, always running late, an over committer who has no problem arriving at your house four hours later than promised and staying with the friends he brought in tow until 4:00 A.M.  Now that may work for some of you, but I am a morning person who rises around 5:30 A.M. and thus, I am typically early to bed as well.  Staying up until 4 am completely throws off my sleeping schedule to say the least. My friend and his entourage would arrive hungry each night, so I felt compelled to feed them.   But nothing in my pantry would do.  They could have been stoned, for all I know.  I am a bit of a health food nut, and they prefer red dye number one in their food.  So off to a cheap drive thru I would go, returning with plenty of food in paper wrappers and red artificially-colored desserts from the grocery.

As you can see by some of my photos, the resulting holiday tree is way over the top, not to mention the many other wild structures hanging from my ceiling!  This was nothing new for my friend, who used to decorate trees for department stores.  He had a certain procedure to follow, many different layers that had to be done before we could hang the decorations on the end of the branches like the rest of America does.  The tree had four layers of trimmings;  first the ribbon around the trunk, then the lights. then smaller decorative balls and glitter, then other ornaments.  Oh, and because we didn't have our hands full enough already, on the third night one of my cats knocked the tree over.  The partly decorated tree was sitting on a glass table to give it extra height in my cathedral ceiling living room.  The kitty was of course curious and jumped on the table, managing to knock the tree over and smash the glass table into a million tiny pieces in the process.  So after three nights of work, no sleep, and a very big mess to clean up, we began again with the tree on day four.  I was not nearly as excited or motivated at this point, but I did have the presence of mind to use a wood table to hold the tree in the event my curious cat (or any of my others) decided to go for an encore.

After the many layers of the tree were complete, next came netting on top of the tree to represent clouds in the sky.  And then of course we needed a giant parasol hanging from the ceiling from which to hang ornamental dogs and cats.  And with clouds and a parasol must come rain, so countless transparent threads were hung from the ceiling dangling crystal raindrops to complete the process, or so I thought.....

What happened for the following several days is still a blur, but after a revolving door of my friend and his helpers, my house was beginning to look like a cross between Sea World, Disneyland, and a French Cafe in Paris.

Sea creatures hung from one end of my living room ceiling, birds were perched on a branch on another side.  Two heavily decorated hanging branches of white owls were suspended from the other two corners of the ceiling.  My friend's thinking was..... because I had such great Christmas tree decorations from previous years, why not use them all and have them admire  the Raining Cats and Dogs tree?

His work is extraordinary and so very creative, but next year if he asks to help I will suggest he go to Macy's and decorate their tree instead.