I didn’t go on about it too much at the time, but Christmas this year was amazing. My husband worked his butt off finishing up various construction projects in time for the big day, and we decorated the house so beautifully I never wanted to go to sleep; I just wanted to wander from room to room for days on end saying drippy things like “Oooooh, pretty lights!” and “Ribbons and pine cones – how tasteful!”
Yeah, I know. Pathetic. But it really did look nice.
We fulfilled one of my lifelong Christmas fantasies this year: we had two trees – the living room tree, and another one in our bedroom. (Yes, they were both live. We don’t do plastic.) I didn’t think about the implications of removing the upstairs tree when I was decorating it. I was too busy drooling and saying “Pretty lights!”
Yesterday while I was obsessing about the details of the ending of my novel, my husband took care of tree removal.
First, he butchered it.
He swears it didn’t feel a thing.
Yes, he is defenestrating the tree. “This way we won’t have so many needles to clean up,” he explained. (He was right.)
Goodbye, dear Christmas tree.
I have never watched a Christmas tree go out a second-story window before, but I have to admit, it was kind of fun.
I’ll be fussing with the ending some more today, in between taking my mom to a couple of doctors appointments. Roger from the Horn Book shared a great link to the true story behind Go Ask Alice yesterday. There is a great quote in the New York Times today that helped me clarify the lines between memoir, non-fiction, and fiction:
“But William Zinsser, the author of several classic studies of the memoir genre, including “Writing About Your Life: A Journey Into the Past,” said the most important element in the genre’s power is truth.
“I think that the strength of the memoir comes from history and from the truth of what people did and what they thought and experienced,” Mr. Zinsser said. “That is more rich, more surprising and funny and emotional and compelling than anything that could be invented.””
That sums it up nicely, don’t you think?