The tree

For years and years, if my wife and I put up a Christmas tree at all, it was a tiny little tabletop tree, and the cats would promptly savage it. Most years…honestly…we didnt put one up at all. Family didn’t come to our place for Christmas, we went to theirs. But this year is a little bit different. This year we have a child of our own. He’s already fascinated by the big tree by the front window, with all of its white lights – we’re still on an incredibly meager budget, so this is one of the $30 pre-lit, all-but-pre-assembled specials one finds at Wal-Mart. For the first time, we finally had something to do with the considerable collection of Christmas ornaments we’ve been given as gifts over the years. And for the first time since I’d been collecting them in the early 90s, I finally had a launching pad for my fleet of Star Trek ornaments.

NCC-1701, no bloody A, B, C or D.

1701-A – still my favorite iteration of the starship Enterprise.

Old-school Galileo.

1701-D. Sadly, some of its lights don’t work. (This tree being pre-wired, I didn’t plug in any of the ornaments requiring external power.)

Enterprise-E. Meh.

Defiant. That’s one tough little ship.

Voyager.

Flying in formation. Kinda.

Klingon Bird o’ Prey.

The one Trek ornament I didn’t put up, the one that remained in my plastic tub o’ Trek ornaments, is the Romulan Warbird from TNG. It’s not that I don’t like the ship, but as an ornament it’s just drab, and suffers from a fatal flaw (most of the lighting gadgetry is concentrated in the “domed football field” thing in the middle of the ship, and not outside where, oh, say, people might see it). I used to display it when I had a big display shelf of Trek figures, with a string of Christmas lights strung just for the ornaments, which would appear next to the appropriate characters, but put this thing on a green tree and it vanishes (which is somehow appropriate, but I don’t allow cloaking devices on my Christmas tree). Sorry, warbird.

Non-Trek ornaments of note:

Star Wars movie poster – clip one of the tree’s built-in lights to the back of it…and it…kinda…sorta glows from behind a little.

Our house. In the middle of our tree.

DON’T BLINK…at the cool fiber-optic color-shifting angel on top of the tree.