There Will Be Blood-Red Trees

“Everybody has a different taste,” Melania Trump said this week.

Speaking at a town hall conversation at Liberty University, the first lady was referring to her White House Christmas decorations, which were unveiled in a short video Monday, and the kerfuffle they caused. Particularly the red topiary trees lining the East Colonnade. The entire nation has come to know the phrase “blood red,” as it became the stuff of late-night monologues.

It turns out taste these days — in Christmas decorations, at least — can be a litmus test for a person’s politics and how they feel about the Trump administration. Not even garland, string lights and candy canes are above partisan squabbling.

Melania Trump’s decorations, which also included “Be Best” pencil wreaths and tree stands (a nod to her childhood-wellness campaign) as well as gingerbread replicas of the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial and other national monuments,could be seen as either “stunning” and patriotic (The Washington Times) or “deeply haunted” (The Cut). It was the rare media outlet that played it down the middle, as did Town & Country, which tactfully called the red trees: “Most striking, perhaps."

It was a design choice ripe for armchair internet analysis.

Twitter lit up with memes likening the trees to the costumes on the dystopian TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale.” The Washington Post published three articles about the decorations, none flattering, including one that explained that in Ukraine, red trees symbolize the nuclear destruction of forests around the Chernobyl site. The Guardian newspaper asked, “Is Melania Trump sending us a message through her creepy Christmas trees?” With her unnatural color choice, the writer suggested, she may be “trying to separate us from nature.”

Melania Trump is not the first first lady to face bah humbugs. In 2005, when Laura and George W. Bush sent out cards wishing supporters a happy holiday season, they received complaints for omitting the word Christmas. In 2009, and for years afterward, a false rumor circulated that the Obamas were doing away with the White House Christmas tree altogether.

Still, for some the critiques of Melania Trump were a yule log too far.

“It seems a little mean-spirited,” said Kate Andersen Brower, of the criticism of Melania Trump’s decorations. Bower, who has written several inside-the-Beltway nonfiction books, including “First Women,” about modern first ladies, continued: “I’m sure it never occurred to her the color was like ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ costumes. I do think the blood red is a bit intense. But she is very high fashion. She finds it beautiful.”

The problem, she conceded, is that, Christmas at the White House is about the potential for cozy, heartwarming photo-ops, and the Trump administration is perhaps better known for battles on Twitter than glitter.

There are ways to soften the first family’s image, especially around the holidays, Andersen Brower said. “The Obamas didn’t need the dog,” she said. “Michelle Obama writes that they would use the dog for photos when they didn’t want their girls in front of the cameras.” Raising children in the White House, which was true of the Obamas, Bushes, Clintons and Trumps, can also be its own asset, with staged photos of a tiny tot trimming the tree.

But Melania Trump has steadfastly, and admirably, protected the privacy of her 12-year-old son, Barron. And her regal, immaculate, 1940s style of dress and coiffure doesn’t lend itself to hugging a slobbering dog beside the chimney.

First ladies have traditionally revealed the White House Christmas decorations during a media event, inviting reporters and in a gesture of glad tidings, members of the White House staff, to thank them for all the hard work behind the scenes. But those events have not survived the president’s war with the “fake news” and his controversial policies.

To top it all off, Melania Trump is “the most reclusive first lady since Bess Truman,” Andersen Brower said.

And so instead, we get a heavily stage-managed Christmas video from the first lady, showing her clad in all black, walking alone through vast, empty, expensively decorated rooms. The effect is of an elegantly-dressed prisoner of Versailles, or “some sort of queen” who has “vanquished her enemies,” as The Cut put it.

Last Christmas, Melania Trump gathered icy white branches to form an archway along the east colonnade, and then walked through the shadowy stick labyrinth wearing a floor-length cream frock dress, as if she were starring in an ad for an as-yet-released perfume: Dior Christmas. At another point in the season, she was photographed standing stiffly and unsmiling as she watched young ballerinas perform. Cue the “Black Swan” memes.

“To me, the decorations are fine,” said Bronson van Wyck, a New York party planner who is much in demand during the holidays. “Pencils on wreaths — that’s crafty and cute. Branches without anything on them is a winter wonderland motif. If Michelle Obama did the same thing, people would be climbing all over this to say, ‘Look! How fabulous.'”

On last year’s branches, in particular, he added: “I think that was somebody who probably didn’t understand lighting and didn’t realize those were going to look like the fingers of Skeletor when you took a picture.”

But the videos, van Wyck said, had an odd tone, “like promo videos for middle-market condo buildings that are overcharged to buyers. If you can imagine a company like that.”

What could Melania Trump do to stifle the haters next Christmas, aside from hire a new videographer?

Andersen Brower suggested getting a dog. Van Wyck was at a loss.

“Who else is going to be in the picture with her?” he said. “If she puts the child in the video, then they’re giving permission for him to be part of the story. If the president were in it, it’s another layer.”

He added, in a phrase the first lady herself might agree with: “She’s damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t.”