I first got hooked on Doctor Who when I was at college in the 1980s. A bunch of us would grab snacks and hang out in the common room at my friend Marianne's dorm and watch weird old British tv on PBS, and this was one of the favorites. We binge-watched, to the extent that was possible, being dependant on the PBS schedule, but for some reason, for some period of time, our local station broadcast a lot of Doctor Who. Once, I gave money and got a lovely little enameled Tardis pin, which I called my nerd-o-meter. If people recognized what it was, I said "ding ding ding," but most people thought it was just a nice bit of Anglophilia, and that was good, too.

I was sure the reboot a few years ago by BBC would be a hatchet job. I mean, the original was hardly high-quality drama. One of the joys of the old one was to recognize reused costumes (dancing eyeball-alien-thing?), identify pieces of set wobbling dangerously, and shout out when the editors reused a shot of the Doctor running down a hall and by reusing the same piece of film, flipped, so that he looked like he was running down a much longer corridor. Silly fun.

I didn't even bother watching the new version until I saw something I can't remember with David Tennant (probably an episode of QI, a terrific game show you should watch), and reconsidered, then binge-watched his, then watched all the Eccleston episodes. Now hooked, I am always on the edge for new episodes, and tell everybody about it like a Victorian missionary. Blessed be the Brits who upload to YouTube, for they have my eternal gratitude, and until recently, beat the local broadcast by about a year.

All of this is a preamble to the fact that we're all fans of the good Doctor here, and it's the 50th Anniversary, and it's Bridget's turn to choose the tree decoration colors this year, and she chose blue, silver and white for a Doctor Who tree.

We're pretty unlikely to do this more than once, so I don't want to invest much in the way of money, and we're not going to be cherishing precious ornaments, so they need to be quick-and-fab. However, Bridget has always wanted the Tardis door for her room, so I am making a police-box light for the top of the tree with the thought that it will be repurposed for her at a later point.

Doctor Who Tree Topper Tutorial