Saturday, December 03, 2005

oh! Christmas tree!

We have had quite a time getting our tree up this year! We started on Tuesday night. We had our holiday music blaring, we had our video camera and still camera ready, we had even put on picture worthy clothing! It's Mark's first tree experience and Mitchell is big enough to start understanding the traditions of Christmas decorating. So here we go! Neil and Mitchell start opening the boxes and sorting the limbs by their colored tags(we have that really nice kind of tree that you get to assemble each year) and I am taking pictures! We got the tree put together and the lights strung on it. Then we had to call it a night because of a tired and fussy Marky, a curious and not really helpful Mitchell, and two fruatrated parents!

Wednesday morning, Mitchell and I tried to decorate the tree and about 20 ornaments into the process the tree fell over! I was able to get the tree back to a standing, but unstable position, and luckily none of the ornaments were broken! Here was the scene: me on my stomach under the tree trying to fix the tree stand, Mitchell standing near my legs asking, "Mommy what you doing?" "WHAT YOU DOING?!!", me saying "Mitchell move away, move away from my legs! Please don't be near the tree! Just stop talking for a minute!" We tried to finish decorating the wobbly tree, but the smallest ornaments were setting it off balance so we just quit!

Wednesday night at about 10:30 after we had all gone to bed, I go downstairs to get something and I find our Christmas tree lying in the middle of the floor of our dark living room with the lights on! You see the plug that the lights are in is loose so I has wiggled it earlier to turn them on but it had wiggled out and turned off and I had just forgotten about it. When the tree fell it pulled the plug into the magical position to make the lights come on! I woke up Neil to see the spectacle! We re-balanced the tree and picked up the ornaments, still none broken! At this point we were about to call it quits on having a tree this year and just wanted to put it back in the box!


Thurday, I buy a new tree stand and Neil puts the tree into it that evening.

Friday, I finally get to finish the tree, but by now there is no joy left in the process! I am just randomly picking ornaments, not even trying to reminise about the sentimental ones. Mitchell is trying to help me but is making more of a mess than being helpful. Finally it is done and we pack up all the extra stuff and clean up the living room! I am not too excited about the tree, but a least we have one, right? I half-heartedly trun on the lights to see if that helps it look any more complete and, surprise of all surprises, it actually looks nice with the lights on! So I like the tree, I really like the super heavy duty new tree stand, and we have a pretty funny story for this year! For a while I felt like the Kranks in Skipping Christmas (or for those of you who saw the movie Christmas with the Kranks)!

Neil even put some Christmas lights around our house! We inherited the lights from Neil's parents, so Neil has had lots of practice with them! Thanks Dave and Eileen! The really neat thing about the lights is that all of them stay lit constantly except for just a few bulbs near the top of the tree that blink!

1 comment:

Gina said...

I want to know where you bought those ornaments. My ornaments break when you look at them. Glad I "stumbled" onto your blog. I had been wondering how you guys were doing.
Gina Blankinship