Trump trees just the latest in Christmas curation

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/12/2018 (2802 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As images emerged of Melania Trump walking, silent and alone, through an enigmatic, eerie hallway of blood-red trees, Christmas came early for late-night comics, meme-makers and the Twitterati. For many observers, the American first lady’s “trees of death” décor registered not as Christmas cheer but as terrifying outtakes from The Shining or American Horror Story.

This year’s bleeding-tree motif topped even 2017’s White House landscape of haunted, silvery, bare branches, which threw unsettling shadows onto the walls and prompted comparisons to Narnia under the White Witch, where it’s always winter and never Christmas.

As with many of Melania Trump’s carefully choreographed photo ops, her Yuletide tableaux suggest a solitary, opaque elegance. The first lady and former fashion model is supremely elegant, but when it comes to Christmas, elegance is often the enemy of the festive. And the fun. And the inevitable messiness of family.

While it’s tempting to go after Melania — so very tempting — she is simply the most visible person to take up the trend of “curating” Christmas.

An increasing number of regular people seem to be heeding the high-fashion imperative to upgrade their trees. According to house-and-home magazines and websites, you need to glam up your tree with gold, or pare it down with Scandi pine, or keep it monochromatic with subtle shades of white and off-white, or splash out with an ombre rainbow.

This year’s super-trendy must-have is the black Christmas tree. Trés chic but slightly sinister, it suggests the kind of category confusion between Halloween and Noel that befuddled Jack Skellington in The Nightmare Before Christmas.

A “design influencer” on ABC’s Good Morning America suggests that black trees are taking off because they look punchy in photographs. “Because real-life décor has really started to become what’s going to look good on social media,” she explains — apparently without any sense of irony — “green doesn’t always cut it.”

The black tree trend supplants last year’s craze for upside-down Christmas trees, an engineering feat in which the tree comes out of the ceiling and points precariously toward the floor. While undeniably attention-getting and fashion-forward, this look also suggests the horrifying inverted dimension in Stranger Things. Or, as some paranoid social media commentators have suggested, out-and-out satanism.

These “black is the new green,” “upside-down is the new right-side-up” trends leave me with so many questions. Who are these people with perfect trees, with matching ornaments, with co-ordinated colour schemes, right down to the presents beneath the tree?

Where do they hide the presents with clashing wrapping? Are they just doing that mall thing and wrapping empty cardboard boxes?

As someone who really likes design, I practise an uncluttered modernism 11 months of the year. On Advent Sunday, however, the minimalist rules go out the door.

Part of this is history. I come from a family that had a knack for bringing home coniferous waifs and strays, appealingly odd trees with bald spots or a tendency to list to one side. One year the tree was so crooked we had to use guy wires to stabilize it.

When it comes to our ornament collection, I could try to bill it as “eclectic,” but it would be more accurate to say “haphazard.” Some ornaments have been handed down, some have been collected piecemeal over the years, and some are lumpy children’s craft projects.

Add in mismatched presents and two kinds of tinsel, and our Christmas décor is unabashedly all-over-the-place. It’s not Instagram-ready, but it’s ours.

While it will never make it into an official White House video, the defiantly unfashionable Christmas tree has a noble precedent. In A Charlie Brown Christmas, Charlie Brown and Linus walk through a tree lot, surrounded by scores of perfect trees. These specimens are sleek, shiny and metallic (and many of them are red).

Charlie Brown, being Charlie Brown, heads instinctively to the only skimpy, lopsided, needle-shedding runt in the place. “This little green one here seems to need a home,” he says. Linus, being Linus, is unsure: “Remember what Lucy said? This doesn’t seem to fit the modern spirit.”

In 2018, the modern spirit seems to have decided that traditional green, skyward-pointing trees are, like, so over. Social media-ready appearances now rule over sentimental feelings.

In this sense, I guess I don’t fit the modern spirit. I’d still rather experience Christmas than Instagram it.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca