The Christmas Tree Dilemma

Temporary Indoor Foliage Is A Distracting And Inefficient Addition To Our Lives

When you decorate and furnish a living space you have two options available to you, as you decide how to arrange things in the room. You can choose either to leave a vacant space in one part of the room where you imagine that a Christmas tree will stand when December rolls around (yes, December; all you trigger-happy lunatics already Instagramming your trees, take note!), or you can choose not to do that.

Should you choose the former option, you are opting to spend eleven months of each year staring at the This Page Intentionally Left Blank bit of a GCSE English Literature exam paper each time you sit down in your favourite chair. A constant reminder that leaving room for a Christmas tree all year long is an inefficient use of space – as well as simply making the area look a little unfinished.

However, should you choose not to leave a space for a Christmas tree all year around, you find yourself in another quandary. Without a designated Christmas tree area, come December (yes, December!) where do you put the damn thing?

The room is already decorated, and fully furnished! You have it looking precisely how you want it! So where now does the precious Christmas Tree go? It must stand in front of something else – something which you chose to have permanently accessible and on view, but which you now cover with a tree. Why spoil a room which already looked just as you wanted it to with the inclusion of greenery which does not fit?

This is the Christmas tree dilemma we all face every year. In December.

But wait! There is a third choice available to us. The choice not to haul a tree in from the outdoors to clutter up our homes at all.

Remarkable though it may seem, our tastes in interior décor do not magically change, just because the calendar tells us it is the month of December. (No more do our tastes in clothing or food, come to that…) If you like how your living space looks, leave it be. If you don’t like how it looks then redecorate it – not just for one month of the year, but on a permanent basis.