Bonzai New Year's Spruce

I don't celebrate Christmas, mostly on account of being atheist but also out of principle. Birthdays are a family festivity, and not public holidays, unless you're a Queen - and as far as I know, Jesus isn't historically held to have been one, the enticing iconography of St. John Evangelist notwithstanding.

However, I am Russian; Christmas trees may leave me cool, but a New Year's spruce is an absolute must for a proper New Year's orgy.

For the past n number of years, my boy and I flew back to Texas every winter to spend the winter holidays with out respective families. This year, we decided to stay put in Illinois, mostly due to impending depletion of our energies, bank accounts and reserves of tolerance for family drama. Christmas came and went without a tree, and neither one of us minded. However, as New Year's Eve began to glimmer on the horizon, something primordially Russian stirred within my breast and squawked indignantly at the lack of pine needles and ornament glass crushed into the living room carpet.


On the 31st, the boy brought home a tiny live pine in a plastic bucket. The trick now was to decorate the undersized bugger without any lights or ornaments. And then my gaze alighted on my jewelry box.


Et voila:



Details of the decor:

1. Bead stuff.

When I was about nine or ten, my best friend took some courses in making bead jewely. She then taught me some of the tricks, and in time I started making serviceable necklaces and bracelets of my own. All the bead stuff on this tree has been made either by her, a very long time ago, or by me, more recently. (Except for the long string of tiny flowers - I bought that in Mexico for a quarter.)

2. Fat white ribbon with gold somethings.

That came from a huge box of assorted chocolatey nosh.

2. The string of skulls.

A Buddhist wrist mala, purchased in 1999 from a curious little Moscow store called "PUKS," which unacronymizes and translates into "The Way to Oneself." It would have been a simple artifact of New Age-y kitsch if not for the cameo made by "PUKS" in one of Viktor Pelevin's best novels, "Generation 'P'."

3. Orchids.

The coup de grâce. The boy's family had sent us a bouquet of orchids a few days ago - a sweet but misguided gesture, since orchids may travel safely enough across Texas this time of the year but they don't keep very well in Illinois. They arrived slightly frost-bitten and shed most of their blooms half-unfurled, so I decided to grab the bull by the horns while he still had them and twisted several of the livelier-looking flowers to the pine branches with thread.

All in all, not a bad effort, I should say.