Tannenbaum

When you have a Christmas tree that needs decorating, and no one in your household seems to have time to do the job, you should hire a six-year-old girl. They are crack decorators and they generally work for pretty much free. 

It's not going to decorate itself. Trust me. 

In my house, this year’s Christmas tree decorating proceeded in stages. My husband picked up the tree on his way between work appointments. He dropped it off on our front porch, and went back to work without so much as a hello. I was working from home that day, and I never even knew that a tree had been dropped on the porch until my son came home from school. “There’s a Christmas tree on the front porch,” he said, because he generally tells it like it is. I told him to text my husband to verify that it was in fact our tree. With that question resolved, my son set up the tree, sorted the lights into working and not-working piles, and strung the working lights onto the tree. 

The next day, someone bought two new strings of lights, which were duly added to the tree. We have a few Star Wars ornaments that plug into the main strings of lights, and so those were added. The rest of the ornaments were in boxes on the floor next to the tree, where they sat for the next three days. 

If you know me at all, even a little bit, then you know that stuff sitting around on the floor, in or out of boxes, is one of my least favorite things in life. I’m all about neatness. I’m all about a place for everything and everything in its place. And I’m REALLY all about getting things done right the heck now. Note that I said “getting things done” and not “doing things” because I didn’t have time last week to decorate that tree. And no one else did, either. But sometimes the cavalry shows up just when you need it most and in my case, the cavalry was one six-year-old Girl Scout who has very definite ideas about what a Christmas tree should look like. And I was more than willing to take direction. 

And it’s a good thing, too, because she’s more than willing to give direction. That is the thing about six-year-old girls. They like to work. They like to be busy. But they also like to be in charge, and their management approach is best described as “authoritarian.” 

When the children arrived (nine-year-old nephew was there to watch football with my sons, not to decorate), I asked my niece if she’d like to decorate the tree. She nodded yes immediately, and then looked right at the boys who were sprawled in front of the TV. “Actually,” she said very pointedly, “I like to decorate the Christmas tree WITH OTHER PEOPLE. I don’t like doing it all by myself.”

The boys pretended not to hear her. “Don’t even look at them,” I said. “I gave up on them two days ago. But I don’t like doing this all by myself either. So we’ll work on it together.” 

And we did. She hung a few candy canes, and then helpfully began giving direction. “Put one here,” she would say, pointing at various spots on the tree that she felt were in need of additional ornaments. “No, not there - THERE.” 

“We need some up high.” 

“You need to put more pretty ones in the front and put the ugly ones in the back.” (Harsh!)

“That one is making the branches bend over. We need to fix it.” 

She’d step back every few minutes, survey our work, and give additional direction. 

We (I) finally finished, just as I had begun to feel a little browbeaten. “My boss doesn’t bark orders at me like that,” I told her, “and he was in the actual Navy.” 

“We can eat the candy canes, right?” she said, blithely ignoring my subtle criticism of her communication style. This ability to deflect and distract will serve her well in her career as a dictator or a tech billionaire. 

“Yes, we can eat them,” I said. And we did, one each. They were delicious, and the tree looks beautiful. Merry Christmas.