The English National Ballet's Pointe Shoe Christmas Tree Is Glorious

December 24, 2017

Happy merry everything, everyone! Whether or not you celebrate Christmas, you’ll LIVE for this:

The English National Ballet has constructed a pointe shoe Christmas tree. It is made out of 540 pointe shoes. And it is even more delightful than you’d imagine.

ENB’s pointe shoe tree has become a holiday tradition, gracing the atrium of the London Coliseum during the company’s Nutcracker run for the past few years. The 2017 tree, which is over 8 feet tall and weighs nearly 45 pounds, features shoes hand-decorated by ENB’s ballerinas. (For the record, those ballerinas go through a total of 4,000 pairs of shoes every year. Hopefully they donated their least—how shall we say this delicately—fragrant ones to the tree.)

In case you’re wondering how the tree comes to be, take a look at this behind-the-scenes vid of the construction process: