Ahhh, Christmas time…It has so much potential for magic, or
stress and disaster!
Jeff and I have our annual disagreement about the number of
gifts the children should get from Santa.
I pleaded more than ever with him this year. I think that if we can make the switch to
Santa only bringing a few gifts, this year is the year to do it because it will
most likely be the last year that the kids (at least Wyatt) won’t really
remember the quantity that he brings.
Plus, Christmas shouldn’t be about how many presents are under the
tree. Jeff’s reasoning is that we
probably only have a few Christmas’s left of Will believing in Santa so we
should do it up now. And so it
goes…we’ll see what happens on Christmas morning.
We love setting up the Christmas tree. But even more, we love the adventure of
finding our Christmas tree. Usually it’s
very cold and blizzard like. This year,
it was unseasonably warm and my parents’ tree farm was a muddy mess! Not thinking, we didn’t have the kids’ boots
out of storage yet, and they ruined both pairs of their shoes, everyone was a
muddy mess, and the car looked like it had gone to the cabin 5 times in one day
as it was CAKED in mud. Not to mention,
a new game farm appears to have popped up on the other side of the tracks of my
parent’s property and we felt like we would hear a stray bullet whiz by our
heads at any moment. No, we didn’t have
any blaze orange on. My dad would be
very disappointed in how unprepared we were.
It was an interesting day.
We found our tree and again, it was way too tall. Yes, we could cut it down to 15 feet so it
would just barely fit under the vaulted ceiling, but really, we don’t need to
push the limits. I’d rather not spend
another year tip toeing around the house and fearing that I will come home
after work to a disaster of evergreen and broken ornaments all over our living
room floor. Jeff loves the big trees and
I do too, but I think a 12 footer is a big enough tree. Jeff, always having a good argument to his
reason, mentions that 1) our next house might not have high ceilings so we need
to get the biggest trees we can now, 2) who knows how long my parents will have
the tree farm and if they sell it, we’ll be paying $200 for these trees, and 3)
(going for the heart strings here…) he wants to create memories for our kids so
they can say, “Remember those HUGE trees we used to get?” Yeah – the minute he said that, something in
my mind said, I think we’ll be saying “Remember that huge tree that was way too
big for our house, fell down, broke all our memorable ornaments, and caused a
few grand in damage?”
Jeff is usually right about a lot of things so I’ve started
to listen to him ;) Plus, he’s like a
little kid with this stuff, so I let him have his big tree. I did plea with him to cut a couple more feet
off the bottom but he insisted he wanted the “memory” of the biggest tree
ever. He assured me it would be fine.
OK, Love. Consider
this one of your Christmas presents.
We got it into the stand, and then Jeff started in with his
perfect Christmas Light application that took over 4 HOURS and a trip into town
for 900 more lights. When he was done,
it looked beautiful, and Jeff informed me that our tree had an estimated
2500-3000 lights on it. Hmmm, I wonder
what that does to our utility bill or our electrical circuits? But, I didn’t ruin his moment and just said
it looks awesome!
Since the light application took 4 hrs, it was too late for
us to trim the tree with the ornaments, so we waited a couple days until we had
a free night to dedicate a couple hrs to trimming the tree with the kids. Two nights later, we had a lot of fun as a
family trimming the tree. Will was
seeking out his favorite ornaments that he remembered and Wyatt was discovering
his favorites for the first time showing us all of them.
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| This is the only "before" pic that shows most of the tree |
When we were done, we noticed the tree was
leaning to the left quite a bit. Hmmm…we’ll
have to fix that once the kids are in bed.
After they were sleeping, we looked at it again and the top of the tree
was actually leaning on the part where the ceiling starts to slope down. Jeff and I unscrew the tree, lift, turn,
re-center and screw it back in again.
Ok, problem solved. Jeff
contemplates tying the tree up with eyehooks in the wall but couldn’t find a
stud in the area of wall he wanted. He
mentioned putting large eyehooks in the window trim (yes, our new front windows
that cost us around $7K a couple years ago and now he wants to drill big holes
in the trim to support our extra large tree).
I dismissed that idea.
The next morning, we wake up to a tree leaning to the left
again. We both have to go to work and
hold our breath until we are home. We get
home and luckily it is still standing.
We go through the same routine that night – put kids to bed, and work on
the tree for an hour. This time, there
isn’t a fresh spot on the trunk to screw new holes in and it looks like a
woodpecker had pecked a ring around and through the bottom of the trunk. This really isn’t good. We did the best we could and I asked Jeff
again to cut a couple feet off, making the tree lighter and giving us fresh,
stronger wood to screw into. We
discussed the time it would take to remove all the ornaments, lights and take
the tree down, saw a couple feet off, and put it back up, retrim, etc. I really didn’t want to see Jeff go through 4
hrs of stringing lights again. We
decided we would stop and get some eye hooks the next day while we were
Christmas shopping.
The next night, Jeff found an alternate spot to put the
eyehooks so they weren’t in our window trim and everything appeared to be good. The next morning, our tree was resting on the
windows. That’s it! That night, we removed all the ornaments
after the kids were in bed, and tried to keep the lights on. Carefully, we lowered the tree, and sawed 2
ft off. Can you believe Jeff still
begged to saw off only a foot? We
cleaned up all the needles and extra boughs and stood up the tree again. Screwed it into new wood and plugged in the
lights – they all worked! I think we had to remove 2 strands since we chopped quite a bit off the bottom. Jeff secured
the tree to the wall with wire and eyehooks and we re-trimmed the tree. And that is the last we’ve had to mess with
the tree.
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| Surprisingly, cutting the bottom 2.5 feet off didn't look much different! |
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| Ready for Christmas Morning! |
Jeff has promised that 12 foot
trees are tall enough for future years (had to get that in writing). Even though he still strategizes about how we
can handle a 15-16 footer again…
So, yes, this tree will definitely be memorable and one we
talk about for years to come, but at least we did not have a disaster in the
house!
Lastly, Jeff was sad that our we could not send our Christmas
cards out this year with the message “Our tree is bigger than yours…”
