Dad's rules for decorating your Christmas tree

The time has come for a favorite family ritual!

Posted 11:00 a.m. Nov 28, 2022 — Updated 11:00 a.m. Nov 28, 2022

Andrew Taylor-Troutman

RALEIGH, N.C. — The time has come for a favorite family ritual! I love that people from different cultural and religious backgrounds still drag a live evergreen into their homes for a few weeks and hang all kinds of shiny things on it within reach of young children and rambunctious pets. What could go wrong? Pour yourself an eggnog. Here we go!

1. Be sure to plug in the stands of Christmas lights to test that they all work before you string them on your tree. The worst is going through all that effort to discover a strand of lights doesn’t work.

2. Don’t let your new puppy nose around the open box of Christmas tree ornaments. Give her a CBD gummy for dogs and put her in the backyard.

3. Don’t let your kids play Floor Is Lava with the most breakable ornaments. Tell them to sit and be quiet. When that doesn’t work, give them chew toys.

4. Don’t let your kids play dodgeball with the most breakable ornaments. Where are those gummies?

5. Have plenty of Christmas cookies on hand. Or your kids will chew up your furniture.

6. String the lights from the top of tree to bottom. Perhaps, like me, you are over six feet tall and would not require a stepladder. Except that you are also like me and took your kids with you to the Christmas tree farm whereupon they convinced you to purchase a tree that makes NBA players appear as the size of garden gnomes.

7. Obtaining the stepladder from the deep recesses of the attic will require a complicated and dramatic rescue operation. Don’t negotiate with the garden gnomes.

8. Once you are finally finished stringing the tree and the kids have wrecked all the furniture, it is time to hang ornaments…

9. But you forgot rule #1 — to test the Christmas lights first! Now a section in the middle of the gargantuan tree is completely dark. Your spouse is in something other than the Christmas spirit.

10. More eggnog!

11. Finally, the tree is all lit up. Time for the ornaments! Young children tend to hang ornaments like they play soccer — in one big clump. If they insist that all nine “Frozen” ornaments should hang on the same branch, let it go, let it go.

12. In order to get a certain Disney soundtrack out of your head, play Christmas carols.

13. Did you know that Alexa can play 250 versions of “Jingle Bell Rock”? Your kids do.

14. Hang the most precious ornaments on top of the tree, including the one from your honeymoon. What a great time that was…so relaxing…

15. Why is the puppy running laps around the backyard? What was in those gummies?

16. When the tree is fully decorated, settle back on the couch to bask in its glow with your beloved ones and the pooped pooch. Teach the kids all three of the words to “O Christmas Tree” and repeat, repeat the sounding joy.

Whatever your religious beliefs, the size of your family, or height of your tree, ’tis the season for holding loved ones close as lights shine in the dark. So, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and cheers. This is really good eggnog.

Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the author of Gently Between the Words: Essays and Poems. He is the pastor of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church. He and his wife, also an ordained minister, parent three children and a dog named Ramona.

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