I'm a little anal retentive about our Christmas trees. Yes, plural. TREES. Only Classic Winnie the Pooh ornaments can go on the Pooh tree. Only plush Boyd's Bear ornaments can go on the Boyd's tree. There is a tree that is for "everything else," but even that is controlled to within an inch of my life.
Alexis, for her part, has her very own tree. She is completely in charge of picking out ornaments for it and decorating it. This serves two purposes: 1. She leaves my trees alone because LOOK! SHE HAS HER OWN TREE! IN HER ROOM! WOW! and 2. Someday she is going to look at this amazing ornament collection she has built over the years and she is going to wonder if there were any Princess ornaments left for the other little girls when she was done. (Answer: No. I think she has managed to buy every princess ornament made in the past four years.)
The point is, she has her own tree to do whatever she wants with--she moves the ornaments, picks out ones that don't match, whatever. I don't care. It's hers.
The tree that I am most anal about is the one that resides in our family room. It's the Main Tree . . . the biggest tree . . . the tree that houses all of the gifts. It's decorated in red and white and silver with a carefully orchestrated snowflake theme. Every single ornament is carefully selected based on how well it matches with the other ornaments. Each ornament is strategically placed so that identical ornaments are never too close together. I literally spend hours decorating it each year, completely going nuts with making sure it's PERFECT. P-E-R-F-E-C-T.
This year Alexis asked to help decorate the Perfect Tree.
I started twitching before the sentence was even out of her mouth.
While she had fully decorated her own tree and even helped with the others without incident, I was admittedly a little freaked out. None of the ornaments are particularly valuable, but did I mention that the tree is PERFECT? As in Martha herself would be proud of the level of anal retentive going on? Because it is THAT perfect.
I finally decided to let the eager little monster help. It was, after all, the right thing to do. Even if just thinking about it made me twitch.
Alexis perused the tubs of ornaments and finally decided she wanted to be in charge of the glass ornaments that are shaped like candy canes. I figured it was fine, especially since I have more of them than I really need.
Alexis carefully unwrapped the ornaments and even more carefully placed them on the tree as I worked on all of the other ornaments.
When she was all done, she stepped back from the tree, looked it over very carefully, and declared it, "Perfect."
I have to agree with her . . .
. . . even if twenty plus candy canes are clustered together in one spot.