Last year our company started a “friendly” competition between the business units.  The objective was to decorate a ficus tree for Christmas using only office supplies.  Our floor threw ourselves into the spirit of competition (I mean we will do anything for a beer Friday) and had what we thought was a pretty outstanding tree.  One floor only used food items such as crackers and condiments and another was only allowed to work on their tree after hours (boo).  Needless to say our tree blew the competition away.

This year we knew we needed to step up our game.  I mean as the winners of the last competition we knew we had to “beat” ourselves.  Well forks that is EXACTLY what we did.  For 2 days straight one of my co-workers decorated our Ficus with a little help from myself and a few others.  We are fortunate that our marketing group is pretty awesome so they had some wonderful ideas and helped out.  I almost felt as though we were cheating having them on our team.  After 2 days of cutting and copying we had a tree that was worthy of a win.  It had focus and direction, a color scheme and was pretty darn amazing, if I do say so myself.  (Everyone else thought it was amazing too, I think even Martha Stewart would like it.)  Well apparently not everyone thought it was amazing, because son of a bitch we lost!  Yeah we were all shocked.

After the winner was announced a few people went next door to see the winning tree.  Let me just say that the bar we set last year was not met.  (And I’m going to tell you the tree we did last year pales in comparison to this year’s tree.)  It seemed pretty obvious to several of us that they didn’t just stick to “office supply” items.  Our group tried to be diligent and follow the rules, for the most part. 😉 But really we we used items we had.

So I don’t have pic of the winning tree for 2011 but I do have a pics of our trees from both years.  As you will see the 2011 tree should have set the gold standard for Ficus tree decorating.

2010

As you can see we were pretty creative.  We used what we had and it was a pretty good tree.  Good enough to win the prize last year.  And that pic is not even the finished tree, it was close but not finished.

2011

But this year’s tree.  Well what can you say?!?!?!  It’s specatacular.  We used balloons as a tree skirt.  Spider webs from Halloween for snow and clouds.  We used solo cups as spiral thingys.  We even hung a PHONEBOOTH from the sky!!!!!  Please tell me how this is NOT a winning tree?

~k