The ghost of Christmas kitsch exorcised?

For Small Boy's first Christmas R and I started a tradition of getting him a Christmas ornament for the tree each year. Since he was almost one year old that first Christmas, he was old enough to pick out his own and he's picked his own ever since. This is a lovely tradition in theory, but in practice, if you stay true to the "you can pick your own" idea, it sometimes ends up looking like this:



or this (yes, that's a trailor home. It says "Home is where you hook up"):



or this:



This year, Small Boy chose this one:



A massive downscaling of the kitsch factor, but still, could Small Boy have taste less like mine? Me, I like a nice delicate glass ball, perhaps frosted sky blue, with just a hint of silver sparkle, or plain etched glass. Really, if I were stupid rich I'd rent a studio apartment just so that I could put up my own perfect tree every Christmas.

This year Small Boy was old enough to help us decorate the tree. Last year helping involved his bringing us the ornaments and we would hang them. This year, he was able to hang the ornaments on the lower branches. This of course means that our tree is never going to find itself in Martha Stewart Living or House Beautiful; it's a bit...haphazard, shall we say. At least he clustered all the kitsch together in one place.



Sorry about the funky formatting; I've tried to fix it about ten times and I give up now. Maybe I'll come back in a few days to make it look pretty, because I'm really obsessed with that sort of thing, but I can't take it any more right now.