Putting Up The Tree

Who knew getting and putting up a Christmas tree could be so much work. Especially when that tree has to travel a few hundred miles to make it to its final destination. I know it is no big deal to a semi truck (that is what they are meant to do) but we don't have a semi truck or any kind of truck for that matter. Thankfully we were only bringing home one tree, not a hundred. I don't think our car could handle that many but all the same I am sure that we were a fun sight to see on the highway coming home with our tree on top of our car. There were a few cars that had passed us with people smiling very big grins. Even with those smiles coming our way we were worried that the tree might loose several of its needles or possibly a branch or two with how strong the wind was on the way home. Because of that we made sure to drive a bit slower. As soon as we got home we checked the tree and luckily for us it did just fine.

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After we were finished checking the tree, Michael quickly put our Christmas tree in a bucket of water while I tried to get our Christmas decorations out of the closet. I had put the stand in the very bottom of the decoration box. At the time it seemed like a smart idea. Yeah right! I am so not going to do that again. It was such a pain to get that thing out. Hope was also a very big help in getting things ready for the tree.I think I need to start watching her better to know how she does these sort of things. Well at least you can see that I was able to get the tree stand out from this picture. After we got the tree all put up and the lower branches cut off we had quite a lovely mess to deal with.The sad part is that this is not all of it. This is only some of the stuff that got stuck in the vacuum. We had a really hard time with the pine needles since they were wet. The vacuum just didn't want to suck them up and so it would clog the thing. The vacuum belt broke at one point during the night but at least we had a extra belt lying around to replace it with. At this point (Sunday night) we were really done and too frustrated to enjoy putting up Christmas decorations. We decided that we would decorate the tree for our family home evening.

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That is exactly what we did tonight....somewhat. We started out with a good spirits but everything went down hill when we found out that some of the Christmas tree lights don't work anymore. We couldn't get one strand to light up at all and another one goes on some of the time but it mostly stays out. We still put that string of lights up on the tree. All of our lights were hard to make stretch out over the tree this year. I had thought that we got a small tree but the lights declared otherwise. I have decided to look for some new lights for the tree after Christmas is over. When the store have everything on sale. If any of you have a favorite way to decorate your tree or just a fun idea now is the time to share.

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Once the lights were up we were ready to put on the ornaments, with a somewhat okay attitude, but right then Michael got cut on his had by some broken glass. It got his hand pretty good. So of course we had to stop and take care of that issue. We were missing something that we needed so Michael and to leave me to finish while he ran to the store. I got the tree done and the rest of the Christmas decorations up when he got back. I know I could have waited for him to get home to continue but I just wanted to be finished at that point. I feel bad that he missed out putting the ornaments up but he really didn't seem to mind. Here is how the tree turned out.I think it looks well enough for all that we went through tonight. I do think that the tree looks a little empty but there isn't anything that I can do about that. Hope was kind enough to be my little Christmas puppy model to show you how big the tree was in our apartment or at least compared to her. Well at least it is all done and I have one less thing to worry about for now. Hope you all have better luck putting up your trees.