OOZING YULE

If you've done it like me, you've got one heck of an awesome tree sitting in your house, just begging to be decked out with all the yule you can throw at it. This is not the time for shortcuts... to be done correctly, this is going to take at least an entire evening, so clear your calendar and prepare for some serious quality time with your loved ones. If every tree was decorated like this, we would all be a lot better off:

• Before you do anything, crank up the Christmas tunes and turn off the idiot box. Go big and go cheesy. If you've got a santa hat or a Christmas sweater from grandma, now is the time to bust it out and display it with pride.
• Make cocoa, add marshmallows.
• Get out your lights. Preferably, they should be extremely well tangled after a year of sitting in their box. Sit your whole family on the floor and untangle your lights together, then plug them in and change out any broken bulbs. We like a mixture of blue and white lights. Next year, we're going to replace every other bulb on our light strands so that we have alternating blue and white lights.
• Plug in the lights and string the tree. Put everyone in the house in a circle around the tree and pass the lights hand to hand all the way around. Make sure to get lights deep in the foliage as well as at the outer edges by following a "w" shaped path... in to the trunk, and out to the edges.
• We've come to an opportunity to go all out here. Buy cranberries, make unbuttered popcorn, put on a favorite christmas movie, and make long cranberry popcorn strings with a needle and thread. Add your strings to the tree as you go until your tree is fully decked out. This is a ton of work, but skipping this step would just be blasphemous. You have a great chance here to spend some much needed quality time with your loved ones.

• I'm a firm believer in original, unique ornamentation. If your ornaments are all designed to be pretty, but have no sentimental value, you've got a problem, but don't worry, it can be fixed! Every ornament you put on that tree should be special. It should have a person or a memory associated to it. (If you find that you have too few ornaments like this, or if you just need a few more, please don't go buying any ornaments this year. It is easy and fun to make your own, and if you do this as a family, you'll be creating Christmas memories to last a lifetime. You can get any number of recipes or ideas from the web, but I prefer the cinnamon ornaments, painted with acrylics, with a finish of clear lacquer spray paint. Mix 1 cup cinnamon with 1 cup applesauce and 1 Tbs white glue to make a dough, and then sculpt, dry, and decorate. As with the pine scent, the strong cinnamon smell these babies give off will help you recall your family ornament making experience every time you open that ornament box)

• Take turns hanging your ornaments one at a time. Remember where they came from together. Forget trying to make the tree "pretty". Go for sentimentality and good spirits, and the beauty will follow.
• If you need more ornaments, make paper snowflakes and hang them on the tree. You can even paint them with lacquer to save them for year after year...
• Your tree should be oozing Christmas spirit all over the place by now. Take a family picture in front of it and go watch a classic Christmas movie together.