Amy Lu's View

Like anything Christmas-related, Christmas trees can evoke strong emotions. These feelings can be a tangled mess of shades of happy, sad, frustrated, and confused, involving cherished family traditions, personal obsessions, and concerns about personal finance, environmental responsibility, and cat-induced carnage.

I could easily (if not skillfully) write a blog post about each of these topics. I want to start, though, with obsession.

At this very moment, I feel quite brilliant because I was inpsired to decorate our fake Christmas tree with our finisher medals (and also, because I have been drinking red wine). These are the medals one (almost always) gets when you finish a race.

This little tree is a focal point of obsession because it gets to 1) show off our running obsession and 2) lets me obsess over how to display said obsession. Primarily, I have wrestled with what race medals should be included and what years they should span. My coverage is not complete (some of our medals are at our workplaces) but there is a medal from at least one of us for almost every race (from 5k through marathons) that we have run since 2015.

Luckily, the medals I have on hand are just about enough to cover the tree. I did have to take the accompanying Bib Numbers off so I’m a little worried that I will never be patient enough to match them up with their corresponding medals again.

When I was a kid (preteen AND early teen) I used to be pretty into having my own fake Christmas tree in my room and would even leave it up into March, redecorating it for Valentine’s Day. As we were running into a bit of a crisis point with what to do with all our medals, maybe I will go with the solution of leaving the tree up all year and just changing the topper.

Chad and I will also put a up a real tree, with more traditional ornaments, sometime this Christmas season. We have a beloved tradition of putting up our tree while completely unironimcally listenting to the “John Denver and Muppets: a Christmas Together” album.

Chad’s family always had a real tree, my family almost always had a fake tree. The Chamy fake tree is usually my thing and decorated with more kitschy ornaments. The only real downside of our awesome finisher medal tree is that I’m not sure these amazing ornazments (including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Marvel Superheroes, and Mario Kart characters) will find a proper home.

Well, it’s well known that to be a successful runner (or obsessed person) sacrfices must be made. Or maybe we just need to get more Christmas trees.

Now if I could only learn how to make a quilt out of all those Bib Numbers…