Hello! If you haven't noticed, the Advent Calendar has been updated for December 9th and December 10th, now with 20% more Waiterbot.

Fun fact: Did you know that each Advent entry is the fruit of 175-200 raw photos? It's true. As it turns out, it's incredibly difficult to take sharp, focused pictures of shiny, plastic objects. It gets even worse with the predominantly white characters, like Mare or Mista Snowman. If I want a shot of either of them, I'm looking at 8-10 pictures before I get one that isn't at least a little blurry. Isn't that fact fun? Maybe, but it isn't as fun as our 2007 Christmas tree.

Speaking of photographical hiccups, I'd just like to point out that this is around the fifth year that I've posted pictures of my lit-up Christmas tree on the blog, and as in previous years, it's blurry and oversaturated as all hell. I've decided to consider this one of the holiday's many traditions.

You can't tell much from the photo other than that it's a tree, but God, we've got a really great one this year. We found two giant boxes of vintage glass ornaments in storage (old thrift store finds), and they conspire to make our tree look like it's been transplanted not by woodsmen, but by a time machine. As I subscribe to the theory that the term "gaudy" cannot apply to Christmas trees, ours is absolutely littered from tip to trunk with all kinds of ornaments, lights, garland, tinsel, and pretty much anything else that I could get the branches to support. It's incredible that the thing's still standing.

Eventually, the tree became so overstuffed with things that we had to call it quits and tell all of our unused ornaments that they'll have another shot at the big leagues next year. Still, all of my old favorites made the cut. There's my Ninja Turtles and Shamu ornaments, which I feel are a classy touch that best suits an apartment as postmodern and stainless-steeling as ours. We progressed even closer toward those ends with at least three dozen beat up cardinals. You know the kind. They always seem to be missing at least one eye. Helping our tree to realize its ultimate potential as a showroom piece, we've replaced the traditional tree topper with a series of ancient, clip-on Santa Claus figures.

Though the first picture in this entry was grainy and useless, I freely admit that the photo above is pure and total sex. Seriously, I'm considering high-gloss wallet-sized printouts of that mofo. A cramped, lit Christmas tree is easily among my favorite sights in the world, narrowly edging out sunsets, city skylines, and the scene from Scary Movie 2 where Chris Elliot has sex with a cooked turkey.

I could stare at a Christmas tree for hours and be perfectly content. Don't really have time to do that, but even with it lit up in the background, I can at least stay half-content. I've had this fascination since I was a small boy, and though I'm sure I would've come to it on my own, I did have some encouragement from Chip and Dale.

I've written about this before, but only for a paragraph or so. One of my favorite Disney cartoons of all time is 1952's Pluto's Christmas Tree, a seven minute shorty where Pluto obsesses over finding and eating the chipmunks who have taken up residence in Mickey's gloriously decorated Christmas tree.

The short is just your usual run of madcap slapstick boings and clangs, but when Chip and Dale first soak in their newly decorated surroundings, it's really...affecting? I dunno. You've got this little scene with the little rats casually strolling along the branches with their arms behind their backs, sopping up the season's sights, and for whatever reason, I love it to death.

In fact, their rare "inside view" of a Christmas tree inspired me to do the same as a child. While I couldn't physically fit inside of my family's Christmas trees like Chip and Dale could, I often took naps directly underneath them, staring up through the branches until the twinkling lights and shiny ornaments finally rendered me unconscious. I tried to recapture this experience last night, but all I could think about was how one of our cats recently puked on the floor somewhere in the vicinity of where I was laying. It didn't kill the mood, but it didn't do much to bolster it.

Posted by Matt on 12/10/2007. E-mail me!