DECEMBER 2005

Tree Watch
Decorating for the holidays - all the holidays

Dr. Erik Collins' tree decorating never ends.

As soon as Christmas is over, he'll drag out sparklers and hats for the Happy New Year tree in January, then rush to unpack hearts and flowers for a Valentine's Day tree in February. He calls his eternally decorated artificial tree a “tree for all seasons.”

Collins, associate director for graduate studies in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, said he has been putting up his tree for eons.

“I started putting up the tree at Ohio State University as a newly minted Ph.D.,” Collins said. “Christmas time came around and I put up a Christmas tree. I always put up a Christmas tree; I'm a big Christmas type.”

A visit from the fire marshal almost stopped the tradition before it could begin.

“The fire marshal came by and objected because it was an indoor building and I had a live tree,” Collins said. “I objected to the fire marshal's objection, but I broke down and decided to get an artificial tree, which I had never done. I've always had a real tree, but luckily by that time artificial trees were beginning to look a lot less artificial, so it didn't look quite so bad, especially if you decorated it well.”

Rather than take the tree down after Christmas, he chose to leave it up.

“I came to the conclusion 'Why not leave it up?' After all, it is artificial and not going to turn brown or catch on fire that easily,” Collins said. “I left it up for a while, but then I began to realize that if you leave it as a Christmas tree, it kind of spoils Christmas. Then it becomes something that is just there all the time, unless you make some kind of big production out of changing it come December.”

Liking the concept, he had to figure out how to make the tree work for every month.

“There is a holiday almost every month, so why not just change it every month and decorate for each monthly holiday?” Collins said. “It makes perfectly good sense to me. I don't see why everyone doesn't have a seasonal tree of some sort.”

Although nine months have designated holidays, May, August and September can cause problems.

"May sometimes creates a little problem, so usually it's just springtime decorations,” Collins said. “August is a tough one, too, because there is no major holiday, so I use baseball cards, and it becomes the baseball tree. September has Labor Day, but what do you put up for Labor Day anyway? So it turns into pro-football tree.”

The tree features decorations gathered from dollar stores, gift stores and party stores.

“Obviously most of these things aren't designed to be ornaments, but they work out pretty well,” Collins said. “Some of these things – I don't know what you would do with them if they weren't put on a tree.”

And while the decorations are different every year, some things do carry over.

“The baseball cards get used every year,” Collins said. “I've got baseball cards from players that no one has ever heard of, and if I hadn't punched holes in them they would probably be very valuable.”

Interestingly enough, no one has ever complained about the tree, he said.

“Some people think it's strange, but not strange in the negative sense,” Collins said. “They're just like 'Hmmm, a tree' and move on. It seems perfectly logical to me, doesn't seem eccentric at all.”

The tree has also provoked friendly competition among his graduate students.

“They try to outdo each other to see who the best at decorating the tree is," he said. "Maggie Mae Armstrong, my most recent graduate student, was the author of the Halloween tree. I do decorate the tree at times, but often they want to. In fact, a couple of folks came by and already said they were decorating for January.”

“I just like it for me,” Collins said. “It's my tree. It's an office tradition, and I would feel that there was something wrong with the office if it weren't here.”

Jason Myers is a junior print journalism major from Conway. He wrote this article for Prof. Pat McNeely's Reporting (Jour 335) class. He is a recipient of a South Carolina Scholastic Press Association Scholarship for performance as editor-in-chief of his high school newspaper, The Prowler.