…I managed to get myself infected with Mono somehow. Early December 1996 I didn’t know this yet, though. I was just lying on the couch, nauseated, sick, feverish. At this point I’d had my ass on that couch for the better part of a week already. I couldn’t go out with friends, missed Olli, I missed Nienke, hell, I even missed going to school. This was a Monday, and it was the start of my second week of that damned what-i-thought-was-flu. I was lying on the couch, frustrated to tears that I felt so miserable.
And you know what my mom said? “I know just how to cheer you up.”
She dragged the (plastic) Christmas tree from the attic, got all the tinsel and balls and sparklies out of the closet, and she started to decorate the tree, asking me often for my advice and my opinion on what should go where. For the better part of the morning, I forgot all about being sick, and for the rest of the week, I had this sparkly Christmas tree to look at. And while it didn’t cure my what turned out to be Mono, it did make me feel lots better.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this story… the moral of the story is not that Lannie likes the sparklies because I hope by God that you would have figured that out by now. Or that my mom can be really awesome. It was just something that popped into my head while I was decorating our Christmas tree in the kitchen tonight, and it made me smile. 
Stories like that are always nice to remember