O Tannenbaum! O Tannenbaum!

This past weekend was Tree Day, otherwise known as "The Third Time of the Holiday Season JPMcD Loses Her Freakin' ........."

It starts with finding the tree. We go live, and The Things think that means they go wild (as in zoo). This year, for some reason, I was really put out with Necropolis and The Things, so we grabbed the first halfway decent tree and brought it home. It wasn't until it was in the living room that I realized we had a mutant tree with antennae.

Now comes the part that no one else in the house can seem to do but me. That would be the lights. We have them on an old cable spool, and I roll them out on the floor, plug them in, replacing any dead bulbs or deleting any dead strings and put the things on the tree. In past years, I would carefully wind the lights around branches and such, having anywhere between 8 to 10 strands, somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 to 1000 lights.

This year, I couldn't find the replacement bulbs I kept (I'm blaming the move), and I had no energy to wind and check and carefully light the tree. I just smooshed (that's a technical design term) the lights up on the tree, trying to hide the cabling as best I could. I was still a strand short.

After the lights comes The Great Decanting. Half a dozen huge and heavy plastic containers filled to overflowing with gee-gaws and doo-dads and all kinds of Christmas regalia are released by The Things. It's almost like watching the little old ladies in their fur coats getting out of their chauffeur-driven Cadillacs at the Day After Christmas sale at Fine's on Broughton in Savannah (that's another story all together).

There's a good side to that, though. I'm so glad The Things old enough to decorate the tree now, I don't even care that most of the decorations are on the bottom half of the tree. All I know is, I don't have to do it.