A bright tree

Tied with the smell, my favorite part of Christmas trees are the patterns of branches'shadows and light that get cast on the wall.



It's hard to photograph. With a flash, the tree looks drab, green, and you can barely see little dots of the lights. Without the flash, however, the photo comes out truer to my impression of how the tree looks at night.



You can tell I took this picture before the lights went out on the fishtank -- the walls are all purple-blue. Driving home, now that it's always dark when I arrive, it looks like we're performing crazy bionic experiments downstairs. Instead of dark windows, or glowing happy yellow light, ours emit a surreal, steady deep turquoise. It's like a more intense, non-flickering version of the color you see from outside when people are watching tv in a dark room. The neighbors must wonder.