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Ariana Grande’s Upside-Down Christmas Tree Is a Metaphor for 2018

Photo: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images

Ariana Grande has had a hell of a year, and she’s channeling her 2018 ups and downs into some seriously elaborate Christmas decorations.

Thanks to an Instagram post from Tuesday, we now know that while the rest of us have been decorating our regular, boring Christmas trees, Grande took hers and put it upside-down, mounted from her ceiling.

Approached by photographers yesterday in New York City, she had just one simple explanation for the tree: “Sometimes life just be upside-down.”

(Plus, if you can’t have grandiose interior décor while living in a Zaha Hadid condo, when can you?)

Here’s a closer, lit-up look at the tree (along with some chic minimal holiday stockings, candles, and another tinier, right-side-up tree), courtesy of her brother, Frankie:

Inverted holiday trees may not be a new trend, but if trees are metaphors, this one, as Grande says, would probably be an apt one for her 2018 — a year she recently described as “one of the best years of my career and the worst of my life.”

Maybe we are all Ariana Grande’s Christmas tree: turned upside down, but still shining and thriving, because sometimes life really is just like that.

But either way, no matter how you’re feeling at the end of this year, let us all channel Grande’s ability to turn whirlwind life events into a beautiful metaphor (or a hit song), as only a true poetess can.

Ariana Grande’s Upside-Down Tree Is a Metaphor for 2018