This past weekend it was time to decorate for Christmas around our house.
We went out and chopped down a scraggly tree from the in-laws property and brought it home in the trusty family sleigh, that looks a lot like a Ford Flex.
As the husband tried to wedge the tree into the stand, I wandered out to the shop where the Christmas decorations should be, in the loft. Organized, easy to get at.
Standing there, looking up at the loft I realized this isn’t true. But I persevered and I managed to get all the boxes down and back into the house.
The cat only ran out of the door three times and I only slipped on one patch of ice.
As Christmas tunes blared on the radio, I began unpacking the boxes, scattering the hoard of glittery reindeer and snowmen all over the floor. The kid could barely contain himself and as I pulled out the lights and began untangling them, the knot was half way undone when I noticed the kid already had clumped eight or nine ornaments on the front of the tree.
I made him take them off so I could wrestle with the lights and bead garland.
The husband checks out of the whole decorating experience as soon as I pull the beads out of the box. He hates those things and even though I try to avoid the inevitable by telling him ‘we don’t need them this year’, within a few minutes, he has the beads out and is trying to untangle them. About twenty minutes after that he’s thrown them out and declared we can just go get some new ones.
So, after a quick trip to the store, we returned with new beads (that we can untangle and throw away next year), some snacks and slightly less drive to decorate.
But we had to charge on and see this through. Christmas cheer needed to be spread.
We needed to remain strong. This is a one night a year. So we began again.
I let the kid start stringing the lights. Trailing behind him, hanging on to the lights so they don’t meet the same fate as the beads. The whole time I am fighting the urge to spread out the strand and make sure there isn’t too many of one colour of light in one part of the tree. Soon the tree was dripping with it’s first layer of tackiness and the kid was is madly sorting through boxes and hanging ornaments by the handful on tree.
That seemed like a good time to duck away quickly and put up the bathroom decorations (yes, we have those). There I was, hanging the Rudolph towels when I heard a weird noise and then a tiny ‘help me!’. Looking in the living room, I saw my seven year old son stuck under the now, freshly fallen over tree.
I stood the tree up, and we repeated step one all over again. This time the tree stands up but we do lose an ornament in the collapse.
Now the kid was sidetracked by commercials on the TV and the husband was no where to be seen. So I turned that off and got the kid focused back on the tree so I could get back to making the bathroom sparkle with cheer. As he hung ornaments on the branches and sang a mash up Christmas carols, Bean Weevil, our cat was going behind him chewing on and batting at the tree.
Once the bathroom was done I began taking out all the little knickknacks for the shelves and the tables, just as I finished straightening the last house of the Christmas village, there was a black blur that went whipping past me.
Bean Weevil was headed at breakneck speed towards the tree. With a flying tackle and a scream from the kid, chaos was in our midst yet again. The tree let a few more ornaments fall to their demise while I wrangled the cat and put it in the basement or a bit.
This is about an hour in and we are only half way done.
The kid has lost interest and now we had a half decorated tree and my decorating spirit was also starting to dwindle.
Eventually, half the ornaments went back into the box, currently there is a giant bald spot on the back but you can only really see it if you sit on a certain spot on the couch. Most of the decorations are all at chest height, since the kid hung them up, Bean Weevil has rearranged a few over the last few days.
It does look pretty good though.