The day after Thanksgiving, Hannah and Arlie took down all the Thanksgiving decor and dragged the 100 or so boxes of Christmas crap out and into the house. They scoured the boxes in a very unorganized fasion and scattered Christmas knick-knacks here and there and then tackled the tree. What a disaster! First of all, let me say, we have a very cheap fake tree. I was always a die-hard real Christmas tree person, even enjoying the annual hunt for the perfect tree and trying not to cry at the ever-increasing price tag. However, one year a while back, my mom and dad were coming to visit - after Christmas. My house looked so pretty and decorated that I thought it would be nice to keep all the decorations and yes, even the tree, up until their arrival in early January. Well, the tree had other ideas. No matter how much I willed it to live, it kept on dying until the ornaments started falling off due to lack of branch foliage. Alas, it had to be removed from the house. In one fell swoop, every last needle fell off and made a nice carpet of pine debris for me to vacuum and the once-pretty tree was just a pile of sticks. Oh well, I thought, the house still looks pretty.
Cut to a few days later, I was at Rite-Aid perusing their 90% off racks at the after-Christmas sale. And what should I come upon but a lovely fake tree? Only $12! My mom and dad were due to arrive any day and I could still pull off the Christmas look with this tree! Yay! I hasitly purchased it, and was only a teeny bit apprehensive when the salesman carefully removed EACH AND EVERY branch and put them into a box procured from "the back room". Ok, so it required a little assembly.....
The long and short of it is that I brought home that tree, redecorated it, and pulled off the perfect Christmas home before my parents' arrival. And every year afterward, it just seemed like such a wasted expense to go out and buy a tree when we had this "perfectly good" fake tree just waiting to be set up. So, year after year, I coax each and every branch into it's tiny space in the trunk/base of the tree and it turns out nice enough.
But this year the kids tackled it. And that means they simply could not grasp the concept that the branches were bundled together and bound with a rubber band indicating they all went on ONE level of the tree. And that the biggest branches went on the bottom, smallest on top. Nope, too hard a concept! So, they wrestled, argued, wriggled and coaxed the tree into submission and THREE hours later they were done. This job normally takes me about 15 minutes. Jeff then had the pleasure of untangling numerous strands of lights only to discover most of them not working and somehow we pieced together enough lights to light the tree. The kids took their own bag of ornaments and added them to the tree. So, about half of it is decorated. Jeff, Hayley and I still need to add our ornaments (I separate them in bags so everyone can hang their own ornament collection). So much for a family event. It's more like shifts.
But the really funny part is that, after the tree was put together and the kids were decorating it, Jeff found ANOTHER tree in the garage that we purchased last year! I guess we thought ole "separate branches" had seen it's last legs and thought we'd get one that came in just three sections. Well, I put this new one together and it was pretty cheesy as well. Oh well, we decided it would be our "theme tree" and put it in the family room/kitchen area. So much for glamour. Two cheap plastic trees later..........
Now the living room is strewn with numerous large Rubbermaid containers filled to the brim with Christmas decorations, books, movies, stockings.........and we still need to find someplace to put it all. The kids are bored with it now, the novelty has worn off, and it will be my job to get it all back in order before the weekend is over.........sigh! I miss the days when they were not interested in helping and I just did all the decorating while they were at school, opening the door to a magical wonderland when they arrived home!
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