We decided to start this blog to keep you all informed on the little day to day things going on in our wonderful, new, exciting life together! yay! So here goes nothing...
Last week, we decided to put up a Christmas tree, and, oh boy, did we not realize what we were getting ourselves into! First, we had chosen to get a large, real tree. Although I love the look/smell of a real tree, this was probably our first mistake as first-time-tree-putter-uppers. The first problem we ran into was that the tree trunk was too short for the tree stand we had. Luckily, the man who sold us the tree had enough foresight to suppose that this may be an issue. He gave us an extra piece of "trunk" to nail to the bottom of our tree if this came up. Awesome! Oh, but the only nail we could find was too short and didn't go all the way through the wood piece.
So, we were off to Wal-Mart to buy some nails. (At this point, it was 9pm on Wednesday night) After driving cross-town and wandering around the store for a while, we made our purchase and headed back home. Aaron nailed the wood piece to our tree, and, of course, our tree trunk was still too short for the stand. So, we pulled out the hack-saw we happened to have lying around, and took out a few of the lowest branches. Low and behold... The tree now fits!
The next task was to actually get the tree to stay up on it's own in the stand. Aaron's job was to tighten the EIGHT metal screws under the tree, and I was in charge of holding the tree straight. (Now if you are usually the person under the tree, please know that hold the tree up straight is not as easy as it seems!) Since this was the first time we had used this tree stand (and it was plastic), the screws were nearly impossible to get tight enough (poor Aaron!) It was during this task that one or the both of us reached our peak of frustration and shouted "I hate Christmas!!"
About 45 minutes and three horribly crooked tries later, we finally got a straight Christmas tree. This is when we realized that we were only halfway through this awfully difficult holiday tradition! Next came the lights (second worst part, in my opinion), ornaments, and star.
When it was all said and done, we found ourselves with a beautifully decorate, semi-straight Christmas tree in our living room. We're learning to just breathe when things get stressful around the holidays and remember what this time of year is all about.
We hope you're having a great holiday season (despite the stress of the tree, the shopping, and the crowds)... Merry (almost) Christmas!!
--Heather
No comments:
Post a Comment