O Christmas Tree....

Several years ago, we bought an incredibly cheap (both in cost and quality) fake Christmas tree. It is small, sparse, and rather hideous, but it suited our needs at the time. Every year since then, I have been determined and ready to buy a new tree, but every year, I talk myself out of it, telling myself that we don't really need a new tree and this one still works. So, the ugliness remains. I try to compensate for it by smothering the tree with Christmas lights, then covering it with enough ornaments to somewhat camouflage the too-visible fake metal-rod tree trunk.

So, once again, last week I had Clint haul the pitifully small tree box out of our storage shed, and I set to work assembling the tree, cursing myself the whole time for not buying a new tree on last year's clearance sales.

After assembling the tree and stringing the strands of lights around it, I put the tree back in its regular corner, up on a raised platform (seriously, the tree needs all the help it can get). The 'Christmas tree corner' is conveniently closed off by the two couches meeting together, which grants me the comfort of knowing that Brennen cannot reach the tree or the presents scattered around it (although he has given it his best effort). I had the brilliant idea this year to let Tayson hang all the ornaments. I unwrapped all the ornaments and spread them out on a couch (all this was done during Brennen's nap time), and Tayson sat perched on the arm of a couch and hung the ornaments one by one.

When Tayson finished, all the ornaments (many of them rather heavy) were hung in a very condensed circular area about 18 inches in diameter. I praised Tayson for his efforts, then sent him to the table for his lunch while I spread the ornaments around evenly and hung the glass ornament balls. The final product was aesthetically passable, if not beautiful. I told Tayson that now that the tree was decorated, he couldn't touch it anymore, and the ornaments are not toys to be played with. If only he had listened...

The other night, as I was preparing dinner, I heard a muted crash. I glanced over in the living room to see Tayson scrambling out of the Christmas tree corner, staring at me with wide, apprehensive eyes. Draped across our couch was the afore-mentioned tree, bruised and broken, with ornaments scattered across the couch and floor, including several broken glass balls.

I reacted as any good mother would, with shrieking, cursing, and promises that Santa wasn't coming to our house anymore. I swooped up Brennen, who was rapidly approaching the downed and injured tree with unholy glee in his eyes (much like the expression in the picture below), banished Tayson to timeout, then tried to save my dinner from burning as I noticed, with relief, the headlight of Clint's motorcycle turning in the drive.

Clint came in the front door, booming his cheerful greeting, "It's my family!" When I didn't respond, he froze and asked me what was wrong. Without taking my eyes off Clint, I silently pointed to the Christmas tree. Startled, he responded,"Whoa! What happened?" With my gaze still pinned to him, I simply pointed to Tayson, who was trying to make himself invisible in timeout. Clint quickly read the situation, correctly interpreted my black mood, and instinctively knew he needed to tread lightly.

My hero husband quickly picked up the tree to replace it on its pedestal, only to have one of the legs on the cheap plastic tree stand snap off. The crippled tree was placed back on the couch to be fixed later, and we all sat down to a somewhat silent and tense dinner. After dinner, we all had to rush off to the church for our young women and young men activities, leaving our sad and decrepit tree still resting on the couch. Upon returning home, we put Brennen safely to bed, and Clint and I tackled the chore of restoring our sickly tree. My brilliant, mechanically-inclined engineer husband was able to jimmy-rig the tree stand with half a skein of yarn and some aluminum tape (he is quite convinced that aluminum tape can fix anything). After successfully placing the tree in the upright position, we than had the daunting and frustrating task of putting all the tree branches (which were still tangled up in lights) back in their slots, since half of them had fallen out. Once that was finished, we cleaned up all the broken ornaments, and rearranged all the remaining ones on the tree. Unfortunately, neither Clint nor I noticed Tayson pick up a fallen-but-unbroken glass ball. Trying to be helpful to get back in our good graces, he unwittingly squeezed the ball too tightly, breaking it and slicing open his thumb and forefinger.

So, out came the first aid kit and we went through the process of cleaning out Tayson's wounds and bandaging them up tight before shipping him off to bed. Here he is displaying his bandaged war wounds. Doesn't he look properly chastised?

The good news is that I now have a perfectly sound excuse to purchase a new tree for next year! And to think that I was worried about Brennen reaching the tree....