Oh Tannenbaum!

Ah Christmas is here! What a lovely time to spend money we don’t have and eat food we shouldn’t eat. I like Christmas, and by no means am I the Grinch. I just happen to look like the guy when I wake up in the morning!

My least favorite past-time of the season is trimming our Christmas tree. To be more specific I don’t especially enjoy the setting up of the Christmas tree. We have a twelve year old artificial tree, which we bought when we were of lesser means. At the time we paid $140.00 with 60% off; which was a sweet deal even then. Being that our tree is older I have to do a lot more “spiffing” up to make it look like an actual tree. First I have to flatten out the branches, dust them, and add 800 lights- each branch has to have two or more lights on it. (I figure if I add more bling to our tree no one will mistaken it for Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree.) Then I have to clean the tree with a Christmas tree perfume which I created to make it smell like an actual outdoor tree, and last but not least I have to fluff each and every branch to make it look like a real tree. (You should see my hands and arms right now; they are all scratched up from the stupid pokey tree branches.) After eight hours of intensive labour I created a Christmas tree worthy of The New York Macy’s Christmas tree windows. Guess What? My tree really does twinkle; no kidding it is true. I will admit there is one flaw with our tree that we can not fix: It is crooked. We have tried almost everything, but our tree seems to insist on leaning to the right. We have even changed our tree stands, but we have had no luck.

Speaking of tree stands, have I got a story for you:

It all started when my daughter was at her grandmother’s house this weekend. I thought that with her being gone it would be a great opportunity for me to set-up the tree and put the lights on it. (We don’t decorate the tree or trim the house without her.) Like I said before it takes me forever to get my tree ready the decorating. If she is at home she is bouncing off the walls, because she can't wait hours for the tree to be worthy of “any window”. Her attitude is: take the tree out of the box, put it up, and throw some lights on it. Done; 10 minutes flat!

David and I went down to our garage where our storage room is located and pulled out our two tubs labelled “Christmas”, and our old tree. Fine enough. It was my job to put the tree together, and it was David's job to find our Christmas tree stand, which was located in one of our Christmas totes.

This part is totally my fault, and I take full responsibility; I left the television on. My sweetheart started to mindlessly pull out the Christmas items while “looking” for the Christmas tree stand. Apparently a deodorant commercial caught his fancy, and caused him to zone out while doing his one and only job. (Now I have to stop here and tell you that we have the coolest stand in the universe, because it rotates!)

Me: (Barking at him.) Hello? David, quit watching TV and look for the stand!
David: I did, and it is not here.
Me: Did you look in both totes?
David: Yes.! (He was a tiny bit defensive when he said “yes”.)
Me: Did you pull all the items out of both totes?
David: Yes. (He was a tiny bit more defensive this time when he said “yes”.)

Seeing that all the items from one tote were on the floor I was satisfied with his answer.

Me: Well then where are they?
David: Hmm…They should be here. (He said it as if someone came in our home and stole our precious rotating tree stand.)

I wouldn’t blame them if they did, because it is THAT cool.

We live in a newer house, and the downside to that is the builders forgot one very important feature of our home. It is what I like to call: storage. We have one coat closet, a pantry, each of our bedrooms has a closet, and we have a tiny storage room under our stairs in our garage. That is it; I just doubled checked. To live comfortably in a newer home you must be an organized family, which we are, thank goodness. You also must be a minimalist, which I happen to be. Holly and David are “working” on it. Being so organized I can tell you where anything in my home is located; seriously feel free to come here and test me. That being said I was shocked when there was no tree stand in the totes labelled “Christmas”. To make a long story short; we spent at least two hours tearing apart our storage room and garage looking for the now stupid tree stand. We could not find it; the stand just disappeared. Did we throw it out? Oh lovely. Now we will have to buy another one, because rotating or not; we had no tree stand. Unless we found someone who was willing hold our tree up for us during the holidays; we were going to be toast. There were no takers. Off to the big box stores we went.

Our mission was to find a rotating tree stand. Sadly there were none. Surprisely rotating tree stands are not a hot commodity this season. Retails did not order any. (I apologize to anybody who had their coats on, and were ready to go and buy a rotating tree stand based on my recommendations.) Sadly, on our quest to replace our stand we were not made aware of the store’s oversights until we were in too deep. We spent at least five hours and a lot of gas going store-to-store in search for a tree stand that rotates. I could have bought one online, but I would have had to wait at least two weeks, and what good what that have done?

We picked up our daughter and came home to a house in shambles. We found out that our cat peed on our daughter’s bed. I am not even going to talk about that… David and I came to the conclusion that we should have never gotten out of bed that day. It was just “one of those days”.

Yesterday I was still frustrated about the missing tree stand, but I knew it was nowhere in our home. David decided it was time to throw in the towel and go and buy a crappy regular tree stand that did not rotate. As he was getting ready to leave I decided to check the Christmas totes one last time; without the TV on. THE DAMN TREE STAND WAS IN THERE THE WHOLE TIME!

David: (In a happy voice; however his voice had a hint of: “See you found what YOU lost." Good for you.) Oh there it is.

Me: YAY, OMG I can’t believe it was in the tote the whole time.
(My voice had no blame tone. I was just thrilled I had found the stand.)

David: I checked that box and everything. Oh look, the stand box is the same height as the Christmas light boxes. I just figured that all the boxes on the bottom of that tote were all lights; I didn’t check that side. But Good Job Amy.

This was my inner dialogue:

Good job? If you had done your job properly instead of watching dumb commercials we would not have had to spend a whole day tearing up the house, driving around looking for a spinning stand, putting the house back together, and finally trying to buy a stand online at 2:30 in the morning as a last ditch effort! And don't forget I kept asking you, “Is it in the boxes?” To which you replied, “No.” Good job, my ass.

This year when it is time to take down the tree we are not going to. We are just going to buy one of those fancy-dancy tree covers and leave it wrapped until next year. I have no idea where we are going to put it, but I will make that David’s issue. David will be in big trouble if he loses an entire tree in coming year, so help me… and more importantly I am not going to be turning on the TV during the all-important Christmas tree set-up next year.

Good job…AHHHH!