For the past two years, an uncle from the 16th floor of my HDB block has been religiously decorating our void deck for various festive seasons.

Affectionately known to residents as “Uncle Eddie”, the festive seasons he has put up decorations for include:

• Chinese New Year
• Hari Raya
• National Day
• Deepavali
• Christmas

In fact, some of you may recall seeing his decorations being featured in our past articles:

This year, I decided to do my part as a ~kind~ and ~contributing~ neighbour and helped to decorate a part of the void deck with a Christmas tree from Masons.

As the menial part of decorating the void deck is usually a one-man-affair by Uncle Eddie (with the occasional help from neighbours), I kept mum about my scheme as I wanted to give him a surprise.

After all, it’s the least I could do for him after all that he’s done for our block.

Here’s how my Christmas tree decorating experience went one fine evening, along with some help from my mother.

Setting up the tree

In the earlier part of November, a 2.1 metre tall Arenaria Christmas Tree was delivered to my home along with a huge box of decorative ornaments (sold separately), courtesy of Masons.

For the uninitiated, Masons is a Christmas store that sells over 1,000 ornaments, decorations and Christmas trees, the largest variety in Singapore.

One unique feature of all their hyper-realistic Christmas trees is that they are designed and engineered with FirTECT technology so that they can last for a really long time.

Upon unboxing, the first thing I noticed about the Arenaria Christmas tree was how vibrant its shade of green was.

This was much better compared to some other Christmas trees I had come across in lighter shades, which often made them look cheap and artificial.

I also noticed how dense, yet unprickly the foliage was.

Each branch was firm, with tips that weren’t too flimsy so that they wouldn't be able to hold up heavier ornaments, but not too stiff so that opening the tips to hang the decorations would be diff...