O Tannenbaum!

You've all see "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation." That was us today. Except we had a saw.

Today we made our annual pilgrimage to Martin's U-Cut Christmas Trees. The first several years in our house, we got sort of a normal-ish sized tree--you know, 9-10 feet tall. It fit in our stand, it fit our tree skirt, and it fit on top of the van. Last year, we ventured into the realm of tall trees. We learned, quite unexpectedly, that a 16-foot tall tree doesn't stand upright in a normal tree stand. We actually had to strap the tree to the stair banisters on two sides to get it to stay up.

This year, a 16-ft tall tree wasn't going to do it for us. We have a 19-foot tall room, and, by-golly, we were going to get a 19-foot tall tree.

We searched the tree farm for a really tall tree. We even brought along a measuring tape to make sure that our selected tree would not be too tall. It turns out that the tree we cut down was 26 feet tall. We took off 4 feet from the bottom and about 3 feet from the top, and ended up with the absolute perfect tree for our room.

Now, finding the perfect tree isn't the problem. The problem is getting the tree home on the minivan. That didn't stop Mark. He payed attention at Boy Scouts, and he is an expert at lashing things to the top of cars. Getting a 20-foot tall tree home on top of a minivan might intimidate some people, but not Mark. No matter how many crazy looks and rude comments we got, he wasn't phased at all. We made it all 12 miles home without a problem--luckily it was all back country roads where hicks can do stuff like strap a 20-foot tree on top of a tiny car and not get pulled over.

We got the tree home and into its stand. This year we were prepared with Bowling's Last Stand, hefty enough to keep a 25-foot tree upright. It worked like a charm, and we were able to center the tree on the window instead of having to stick it in the corner to anchor it to the staircase this year. A little trim on top and bottom gave us a 18 1/2 foot tree--with just enough room for a star on top.

How does one decorate a 19-foot tall tree? Well, with a 16-foot A-frame ladder, of course. We bought this giant ladder when we painted that big room a couple of years ago, and it has come in handy a few times. We just parked it right up next to the tree, with the 8-foot ladder on the other side, and it made lighting the tree a snap. Well, almost.

Turns out we only had 400 white lights on green wires. That did about the top 6 feet of the tree, and so I went to Target and bought 8 more. Those made it to about 1/2 way down, and I drove to Walgreens where I bought 8 more strands, and still did not have enough lights. One more trip to Walgreens for 4 more strands of lights, and we were in business. This tree is so shiny.

Last year Mark and I swore an oath that it was the last year of the hobo tree. We have always just put all of our random decorations from whatever on the tree. It made me crazy every year, but that's what we did. For a lot of years, it didn't even matter, because we had so many little kids around that they just un-decorated the tree as fast as we could decorate it. I couldn't find any ornaments I was crazy about (well, any that I was crazy about AND were less than $10 each), so we just bought a few boxes of shatterproof ornaments at Target, and we're good. 150 shiny balls and 2400 sparkling lights. I did let the kids put the "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer" ornaments around the tree from the box of hobo ornaments. But that's it. Everything else matches.

The kids had a blast climbing up the ladders and putting the ornaments all over this big daddy tree. Once it was done, we vacuumed, moved the furniture back into the room, and were all amazed at the beauty and brightness of our perfect tree.

Hopefully the stand keeps working its magic and we wake up to find the tree still standing tomorrow. I think it is the prettiest tree I have ever seen.....and definitely the most well-lit.

Vie treu sind deine Blätter!