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'Tis the season to be a little lazy - some hard-pressed Kiwi homemakers are hiring professional Christmas tree decorators to tart up their tinsel.
Craig Thorburn, designer at the Christmas Heirloom Company, is flat out trimming trees for corporate and individual clients.
He says he has decorated one woman's tree every year for the past 12 but has never met her - she leaves the decorations and a plate of cookies for him as if he was Father Christmas.
Thorburn charges $80 an hour, and it takes him about an hour-and-a-half to decorate a 2m tree with lights and 200 to 300 decorations.
And he doesn't like decorating real trees, "because you're decorating on spring growth and the decorations we choose are too heavy. It takes twice as long to decorate a fresh tree."
Meanwhile Kiwi "Martha Stewarts" Caroline Caldren and Valmae Cameron, through their company O2B Inspired, run seminars on how to decorate Christmas trees.
"We started off [three years ago] and we did one for Christmas," Cameron says. "This year we had to extend it to four and we were turning people away."
The seminars costs $25.
