Putting up the Christmas Tree

 Because it has been such a strange, sad and gloomy year, we bears decided to try to cheer it up by encouraging our human guardians to put their Christmas decorations up early.

Polar and Grizzly have a thirty year-old artificial tree which they bought when they lived in their first house, long before they had bears to look after.  It lives in the loft between Christmases.  Hanley, who lives anything technical, enjoys helping to put it together.

There are three separate sections which Polar has to fit together, as they are far too big for small bears to lift.  Our job is to straighten out all the branches, as it gets crunched up when it is in its bags in the loft.

'I think they need more straightening than usual,' I told Hanley.

'They probably do, duck,' he answered.  'Don't forget, they used a different one last year, so it's had two years in the loft!'

Little Waverley joined Hanley on top of the middle section to make sure the top section was properly fitted, then Endon helped him to climb right to the top of the tree with the sparkly snowflakes we put at the top.

'Don't put any more decorations on yet!' ordered Hanley.  'We need to check the lights and put them on next.'

This was another Hanley Bear job, of course!  Polar bought some new ones in the sales last January and Hanley had been itching to try them out, because they can be set to flash or twinkle, as well as to just shine, but we found the flickery options soon made our eyes feel funny!  Hanley switched the lights off so we could all recover.

When he was feeling better, Hanley slung the coil of lights over his arm and scrambled up the tree with them, spacing them out as best he could to cover the whole tree.  Then he switched them on again, and we all cheered.

Now it was time to add the rest of the decorations.  We let Waverley take the small baubles for the top of the tree.  He's a very good climber and, like wild cubs, quite fearless when he's high up.

Polar bags the baubles up in sets of different colours, so she can do a different colour-scheme each year, but we decided we wanted to put a mixture of all different colours on the tree and picked out the most sparkly ones.

Endon took the green ones, Hanley went for red (of course) and gold, and I put the silver ones on.  Then we found some strings of shiny beads and the tinsel, and added some of those.

When we had finished, we called Polar and Grizzly back in from the kitchen.

'Oh bears, that's lovely!' said Grizzly.  'It's just what we needed to cheer up a gloomy winter's afternoon!'  And Polar gave us all hugs.

There were still lots of baubles, tinsel and another artificial Christmas tree left over.  'Are those going back in the loft?' I asked.

'Not yet, little bears,' said Polar.  'I have something planned for these.'

But you will have to wait and see what that is!