And, yeah, spray-painted pine cones make great ornaments. Also good centerpieces if you put them in a bowl.

For the table: this is something my mother and grandmother used to do, which probably dated from the 50s, so it’s both festive AND retro: They sprinkled big, shiny Christmas-themed confetti on a white tablecloth, then covered the whole shebang with red netting. Centerpiece was usually glass ball ornaments in a glass bowl.

When I was much, much younger and stupider, early in my freshman year I was dragged by my dormmates to a couple of frat parties as the prelude to going for fraternity rush. I’d seen my share of drugging n’ drinking in my high school years, but the alcohol in play was just enormous - people were literally drunk beyond all reason and logic. More than once I helped roommates get through situations where they were a couple drinks shy of alcohol poisoning.

And part of that was because the alternatives weren’t promtoed much. Purdue used to have a halfway decent foreign movie series through the school year, and usually had at least a halfway decent live music series (I saw the Pretenders both in Chicago and a year later on campus, and the campus show was far, far more accessible and just plain fun) - I hope they still do. But there were never many events that were campuswide and easily accessible, as there were/are at IU or Illinois or even Notre Dame. What there was was Greek-dominant (though the GDI crowd tried to do this and that when I was there), and probably still is so.

And at least when I was at Purdue, it was because the university was afraid of being involved in situations where alcohol was involved, while they concurrently turned a blind eye to the Greeks and their craziness.

My two bits…

When I was a preschooler, I broke all of the glass bulbs on the Christmas tree by bowling them down the long coffee table and off the end for fun. My parents were really struggling and could not afford to replace them, so my mother (a Mainer from a subsistence-farm) took us to the local park. We got pinecones from on and under the trees, some wide Hemlock cones and some long, narrow ones. My mom got tiny cheap screw-in eye screws from a hardware store, and then spray-painted the cones gold and silver. She hung them with bent paper-clips. I still hang several on the tree every year, and my son is almost the age I was when we made them.