My daughter’s junior kindergarten class had a homework assignment last week: decorate a construction paper cut-out Christmas tree. Not just color it or paint it or throw glitter at it: decorate it. With stuff found around their homes.

Emilia takes directions like these very seriously. “I can’t just put stickers on it, Mommy. I have to find things in our house.”

And so she proceeded to trawl the house for random bits of whatever to stick to her tree, among which: a bottle cap, ribbon from one of her birthday gifts, bits of aluminum foil, packing tape, more ribbon, another bottle cap, some strips of brown fabric that may or may not have been torn from one of her brother’s stuffed bears, bits of paper on which she wrote her favorite words and numbers (“good” “candy” “39”) and two or three dust bunnies that she found under the sofa. Most of these she clustered near the top of the tree, because, as she said, “it’s very important, Mommy, to always put all your best stuff at the top.”

So it all had to to on the top. Well, all of it except the brown bear-fabric, which had to go at the bottom, “because brown always goes to the bottom.”

And so we ended up with this: