bat the ornaments off of the tree

I’ve never had a tree mishap, even with kittens. Occasionally, one of them will knock an ornament off and bat it around a bit but that’s it.

However a friend of mine had a cat that pretty much demolished her whole tree. Ouch.

for the first several years I used to sneak a real tree up in the middle of the night...am getting too old for that and don't really care now that the kids are grown

Have a fake one.

My husband does that. He's so silly.

artificial tree in the living room. 🌲

First it was because all the kids were out of the house.
Then, as my husband was fading, he wanted a tree in the house. We did that for three years.
Now I just go visit.

We have two (they are indoor plants)
and decorate them - and then tend to them throughout the year.

the ornaments show up better

I have to rearrange furniture and a tree still takes up too much space. We do have a nice collection of ornaments to display and trash picked a nice fake tree from neighbors that were moving, so I really do not know what we will do this year.

Or, on second thought, I might pick up a fake Christmas tree so I can take videos of my cats trying to climb them--and then upload them to Youtube.

because we like to put it early and leave it until Jan 6th

But figure that if I'm going to ridicule Xians I'm going to ridicule Muslims and Wiccans and Buddhists and Taoists and those given over to the arcana of string theory.

So I ridicule none of them.

I would like to see the ridiculous Xmas tree no longer part of the US cultural economy, however, with official US governmental imprimitur. Then again, I think of a national day of Thanksgiving as a kind of Constitutional no-no; it is, after all, what Jefferson and his "wall of separation" was referring to.

(I call myself a Xian, but figure that a cross is in no way Xian. Nor Xmas. Nor Xmas trees.)

And I'm one of them, even without a cat in the household. We do have a large dog with a powerful tail, however.

I had a real tree every year for over 50 years. But that damned craigslist came along, and 4 years ago I found one of those super expensive 9 ft pre-lit beauties with its own canvas case for $100.