The Staff that Decorates Together Stays Together

Our version of the book Christmas tree!

Yesterday Emily emailed the staff a link to a picture of a library Christmas tree made of books. I thought it was cute and wondered if we could do the same. But  then I forgot about it. After all, we have students finishing up papers and starting to prepare for finals. And we’re moving things around getting ready for the renovations that are to start in our building in a week.

Then later in the evening, we had a small break from the endless stream of questions that always accompany the last week of classes. Maybe we had a moment to get in the holiday spirit. Maybe it was that we had eaten several pounds of the candy we had brought to give out to students. But we started thinking that maybe we could make a book Christmas tree ourselves. So we did.

I called Emily out of her cubicle to help me. She went up to find some rarely used books for us to use. I started laying out the first row with some older reference tomes. Then everyone got involved.  Charles started looking in one of the closets and found some decorations that had not been used in years. Our student worker Tena helped drape the garland and hang our ornaments. Then Charles found some lights. At the end of the evening, we had a most beautiful book tree as well as two lit up and decorated potted plants. And we, along with the students, had a great time in the process.

So what was the lesson learned by the great book tree endeavor? Maybe it’s that the library staff needs to eat less sugar. Maybe it’s that we need to weed out some of those reference books that make up the base of our tree. But it just may be that when you’re the most stressed and sure that you don’t have time to do anything other than work, that’s just when you need to let a little fun in your life.