The TDG-Phenix Christmas Tree: One Bad Idea
I thought I was going to give Martha Stewart a run for her money. “Martha’s got nothing on you” was one comment flying around. I’m sure after this Christmas debacle, there is no future in becoming the ‘holiday decorator to the stars’; I will explain.
Christmas ingredients: (1) eleven-foot fir (yes, eleven), 1,900 lights (keep reading), lovely gold sheer ribbon, several decades of ornaments from around the world, a few birds nests and 1/2 pound of flour. Yes, you heard it right, flour.
After strategically stringing the 19 strands and neurotically flowing ribbon in an ever-so-festive manner, I hung the ornaments and faux birds on the branches. The tree was missing something…. ah, yes… the look of a freshly-fallen snowfall on its limbs.
I’ve never been one for ‘going green’, but this year, I wasn’t thrilled about buying bags of plastic ‘faux snow’ to sprinkle on the branches and subsequently for my less-than-brilliant cat to probably consume (it’s not the consumption, it’s how it comes out in the end…) So, while looking through my cabinets, I had a brilliant idea: I could sift flour onto the branches and give it the “Christmas in New England’ look AND it would be feline-friendly, since I know he wouldn’t attempt to eat it. It came out stunning (at least in my mind):
The final product, ‘sans flour’. Note the extensive collection of Harrod’s Bears |
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The ‘eco-friendly’ tree, adorned with Gold Medal (flour) |
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What I was quickly reminded of from my thousands of hours watching cooking shows is that when one needs to thicken a sauce they add flour. In the case of a living Christmas tree, when one adds flour as a decorative accoutrement, it has this tendency to suck all of the moisture out of the needles, leaving one with a petrified evergreen that drops needles like I drop hair off my head.
The final event in this debacle was trying to extricate this monstrosity from the great room post-holidays. Flour, unlike the plastic snowflake product, seems to become airborne, creating a dust storm that rivals the plains of Kansas. After 6 hours of sawing, throwing, sweeping, vacuuming, vacuuming and vacuuming, we managed to get to the dusting component of the holiday decorative disaster. It’s nice to see the hardwood floors again.
