tradition

Before we had kids, Eric and I always bought "real" trees to decorate at Christmas. The fear of your one year old eating/climbing/catching fire to a real tree was enough to send us to the store for one of those real nice artificial trees...oh... about 4 years ago... and we have used it ever since. It never seemed real, smelt like plastic, and I couldn't wait till the kids were old enough that we could get a real tree again and be rid of the ugly artificial one! This year (since we officially have zero babies in our house), we were excited to buy a real tree again. So we did. It was a beautiful, full, um British? tree, and it looked so lovely as we placed it in our tree stand in the living room. We screwed it to the tree stand...it fell over and scared the cat. No problem... that tree stand is old and we need a new one. So we bought one... a really nice one.

After a solid hour of positioning and repositioning the tree into the tree stand, we finally had to come to terms with the fact that it looked like it was leaning back and to the right, but at the same time the angel on the top looked like it was about to jump off...hmmm.

Tonight... we were sitting on the couch about one minute and seven seconds after the kids went to bed... just commenting on how the angel looked particularly suicidal tonight... when the whole thing just fell over. We grimly cleaned up the forest of pine needles, the lake of sappy water running across the floor, and several broken ornaments. We took all the ornaments off, spent a good half hour re-attaching the tree to the tree stand, I combed the pine needles out of my hair and washed the sap off my face and we re decorated the tree. We hadn't been back on the couch 5 minutes before the whole mess fell over again.

The ornaments are now all in a box, I would have thrown the tree into the backyard ( and very likely set fire to it) if the branches hadn't dropped to where it would no longer fit. It is now propped against the door and I refuse to give it more water. If it wasn't dark and spidery in the shed, I would retrieve the clippers and make a wreath out of the doggone thing! In the morning, Eric and I will be collecting our beloved artificial tree that fits so nicely in its tree stand, and God bless me if I EVER consent to buying a "real" tree again...

And if anyone knows what will take tree sap out of hair.. .please let me know...

I was going to write about Ava and I making dog biscuits tonight... but the tree distracted me... sorry...