Christmas amid the chaos

I know: A real gay would do some basic housekeeping QC before taking a picture of his tree and posting it on his blog. He'd also hunt a little harder to find his real camera instead of using his blurry camera phone. But I live to do things only halfway, so if you want holiday perfection maybe you should go hang out with Mitt Romney and his 100%-not-homosexual family. I'm kidding! Come back! Mitt probably gives boring presents like flip-flops (ahem) anyway.

So this is the fiancé's and my first Christmas together in our combined household. Which means it's the first commingling of our Christmas crap. And even though we'd just gotten back from vacation and our dining room is torn up and the fiancé's brother is living with us and my folks are coming in a week and there was no food in the house, I decided we needed a little Christmas and I insisted on hauling out all our holly and singing along with my Messiah CD as I strung lights and created artful arrangements of fancy ribbons and sparkly glass balls this weekend. Just like most guys did.

You can't tell because of the dark ... and the camera phone ... and my uncontrollable DTs ... but this tree is brimming with golds and burgundies to complement the chocolatey beiges of our living room. We still need to find a tree skirt and a suitable topper—and we're not convinced this is the best tree location—but I think Our Very First Tree turned out to be pretty lovely. That's Christopher Meloni on the TV, just moments after he discovered he was suffering from temporary blindness after a violent blow to the head. I sacrificed quality Christopher-and-Jake time to photograph my decorations for you people. The TV is in the picture because I wanted a wide shot of the room to show you the Ralph Lauren Suede wall color and the fancy decorations on the table in the little sunroom, but my damn DTs have reduced everything to a dull blur. If you embiggen the picture, you can see the Mickey Mouse Christmas stockings we just bought hanging on the backs of the sunroom chairs. The darker chairs are from the dining room. They're crammed along the walls of the sunroom because the dining room is under construction. Still. As you can see here:

I had a little four-foot tree left over from my Shoebox Manor days, so we put it up in our always-under-construction dining room after spending most of the day installing those goddamn wall mouldings. Which turned out to look pretty freakin' cool. We still have weeks of painting and glazing ahead of us, which is why the room looks like a home-improvement store. But I wanted some goddamn Christmas cheer amid all the clutter so I put up my little tree even as the paint on the windowsill behind it was still emitting fresh-paint fumes. The tree is resplendent in silvers and blues to complement the room's color scheme and to remove every shred of doubt the neighbors may have as to just how gay those two tall guys across the courtyard really are.