Confession time. My family has never had a Christmas Tree. I know, I know. Shocking. Awful. Horrible. Right? Well, it probably had something to do with the fact that we’re Jewish.
So yeah, I grew up celebrating Chanukah for eight crazy nights while many of my Christian friends only had the one day of Christmas. But other than the 8 vs 1 ratio, Chanukah comes up pretty short. There’s no massive decorations on your house. No Christmas lights to triple your electric bill for the month. And worst of all, no Christmas tree.
People joke about a Chanukah Bush and no, I never had one. But I was always super jealous of my friends with Christmas trees. Every year, we’d go to our neighbors to see their tree. I loved looking at the variety of Christmas tree decorations they had up, along with all the hidden candy canes! It was always fun trying to hunt down a candy cane, as well as seeing where they placed some of my favorite ornaments.
After I graduated college, I shared a house with a bunch of my friends. They wanted a tree, so they bough a cheap one and some basic ornaments. But we were all big comic book geeks (note the important term “were”) so we couldn’t do with just some red, blue, yellow and green balls on the tree. We bought a few fun Star Wars and superhero ornaments. But then a few of us had an idea.
We pretty much raided the house to find anything we could hang from the tree. Boxes of Kraft Mac & Cheese, empty Campbell’s soup cans, and my personal favorite contribution, an empty White Castle hamburger box. It was the finest decorated tree I’d ever seen.
Nowadays we actually go a little nuts every year for Chanukah in terms of decorations. If Allie had her way, we’d hang up blue and white lights outside the house. We don’t go quite that far, but we do a pretty crazy job of decorating our house for the holidays. And no, I’ve never hung a White Castle box from our menorah. But that’s not a bad idea…
What are your favorite Christmas tree decorations?
This post was sponsored by Tesco. While I was compensated for this post, the thoughts and opinions expressed in this post are my own and in no way were influenced by the company.