Although it's a bit early, today seemed like a good day to put up our Christmas tree and decorate it. Normally I would wait until the first week in December, but it felt like everyone needed just a little bit of fun today. I didn't realize just how heavy a 6 1/2 ft boxed tree was. It came into the house and down to the basement quite easily. Getting it back upstairs was an entirely different matter. In the end, I had to bring it up in stages without the box. That was the first obstacle.
Never having set up a tree before (that was the ex husbands' task), I rather foolishly was under the assumption that it couldn't be that difficult - mostly because of the fact that my ex-husband managed it every year. I should know better than to assume anything. When the tree stand had me momentarily baffled, I should have had an inkling of how this was going to go, but I didn't. Once I managed to put the stand together, I proceeded to start placing the tree into it. There were only three pieces, so I figured we'd be done in no time. At this point I should clarify that I did have a 15 year old assistant, although not the one that lives here. Once the first piece was in, with all of the branches fluffed and the attached lights sorted out, I noticed that the bottom branches were touching the floor. I commented on this, and my "assistant" then asked (actually it was more like a sigh) whether I had put the right piece in. Well, of course I did!!! There was a plug at the end of the lights, so it had to be the bottom part, didn't it? Again, there was another sigh from the other side of the tree.
Taking a closer look, I realized that I had indeed put the wrong piece in first. Enter disassemby mode.
After a bit of time and more effort than I had actually anticipated, all three pieces were in. It was then that I noticed the three screws lying on the floor. The screws that were supposed to be anchored into the stand once the first piece of the tree was put in. By this time, my assistant was highly disgusted. I could feel the Christmas spirit starting to trickle out of her with each passing second. When she realized that it would be her job to crawl under the tree and put the screws into the stand since I couldn't see a thing under there, the trickle became full fledged oozing. I was losing her, and fast. The only thing that saved me was the chocolate chip cookies that she could smell baking in the oven. I may not know much about tree assembly, but I do know enough to have some kind of bribery in place when working with teenagers.
By the time the cookies were out of the oven, the teen that actually belongs to me decided to crawl out from her cave and grace us with her presence. She usually tends to show up after the dirty work is done, so no one was expecting to see her until it was time to put ornaments on anyway. To her dismay however, the ornaments were still downstairs in a box too heavy for me to bring up alone. Her friend was clearly finished assisting by this time, so it was up to her to help me. I'm sure that I would have gotten the same reaction had I asked her to run 5K in a snowstorm, naked. After a half hour or so, she finally caved and half-heartedly helped drag the box upstairs, with me wincing at every bump from her end since there were very fragile items in that box.
I assumed (again) that this would be the easy part. It should have been, and it would have been except for the fact that I gave my old package of ornament hooks to my ex-spouse the other day. Had I known that my new hooks wouldn't work with most of my ornaments, I wouldn't have been so kind and generous. Of course, it's my own fault because I just HAD to buy the pretty and fancy looking ones last week. Being a couple of creative girls though, we found solutions and managed to get the job done.
We reminisced while decorating about the kinds of things I used to do to my daughter in jest when she was younger. She remembered the "candy cane" chalkboard that I had on the fridge. December started with the chalkboard full of candy canes that I had drawn. Whenever she misbehaved, the "elves" would come and erase some of them. She knew that if she got down to less than five candy canes on that board, Christmas would be a wash. Worked like a charm. And she has finally stopped being mad at me about the "marshmallow farms". That started hen she was three and we had driven past a farm with bales of hay wrapped in white plastic. My daughter asked what they were and I told her that it was a marshmallow farm, and those were marshmallows waiting to be cut up and bagged. A year or so later, we passed another farm and the bales were wrapped in black plastic. I told her they were the burnt ones. Unfortunately, at that stage of her life she believed everything that I told her. All was fine until she visited a farm with her grade one class. I knew I was in trouble when I saw her stomping up the driveway after school with steam coming from her ears. She has only just recently let this go and can now laugh about it. And laugh we did tonight.
All of the little annoyances and set-backs were worth every minute. The laughter and giggles that rang through our home tonight was such a very welcome sound. There was happiness and a nice easy and relaxed atmosphere that confirmed that everything is it should be. It's the way that our Christmases used to be until a few years ago, and the way that they will be from now on.
And I've marked the bottom part of the tree for next year. Just in case.
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