pink and sparkly holiday

Last year I finally caved in and bought a Christmas tree … the day after Christmas when it was on clearance. It was one of those Pink and Sparkly Barbie Holiday Trees, which seemed like the right size and temperament for me and my house.
I assembled the tree last night and my boyfriend helped me decorate it. It is very sparkly, especially when you add blinky lights. They aren’t as blinky as some people might like them, because the super-fast blinkiness promised to be a migraine trigger. However, a nice slow blink, reminiscent of the old HTML blinky tag that I am not going to resurrect here, produced a very pleasing effect.

Here’s a picture of the tree after we finished decorating it last night:

You can’t see the snowflake at the top, and we’re still trying to figure out how to get it a bit higher. It’s a silver snowflake ornament that my mom bought when I was a baby and very pretty (it would be even prettier if I polished it a little more). I think my mom keeps angling to get it back again, but it has my name engraved on the back so it’s mine.
Along with the standard childhood ornaments and other landmark ornaments, like the one my baby brother made 10 years ago, we had a little fun decorating. I had some of the Vice Charms leftover that went into JournalCon panelists’ gift boxes as well as a few odd decorations I bought over the years. There’s a nearly nekkid Art Deco chick that I bought at Whole Foods one year (I’m not sure what she has to do with the holiday but she looks nice on the tree), some ornaments representing the movie Casablanca that my mom gave me … and then there’s the typewriter ornament with a bottle of booze hanging next to it, a holiday skiier with a pack of cigarettes nearby, and a snowman that we thought looked a bit tipsy before we even started decorating, so we helped him along:

The gift at the bottom of the tree is for me but I’m not allowed to open it yet and I have no idea what it is.
And what music did we listen to as we put the finishing touches on the fabulous pink tree? Why, A Sesame Street Christmas, of course. “… And a cooooookie in the tree.”