Thread: christmas tree

So, back when I had the 14' tree...I was hosting a Christmas party with my ex. I had decorated the tree (almost 3 hours) the day before and was upstairs getting ready...my mom was in the guest room and my ex was in the bathroom.

I had secured the tree with wires to two pints on the wall (mistake #1), so I though all was well.

Then I heard the crash...I couldn't bear to look...then I heard my mom laughing.

The tree had shrunk just enough to pull itself off of the spike in the bottom of the stand. The weight of the ornaments made the top heavier than normal (although not top heavy) and it was enough to allow the tree trunk to shift the stand back, with the wires acting as a fulcrum.

Luckily, only a few plain glass balls broke. My mom was laughing at the other ornaments, which had been "flung" across the room by the torque of the tipping tree and had landed on the sofa. THe tree-topper (a large glass spike) had gone point first into the crevice between the cushions. My mom said that the ornaments looked like they had jumped for safety.

I had to finish getting the food ready, so she started redecorating the tree...in many cases just tossing the ornaments and leaving them where they landed.

The guests thought the tree was great...so I wasted 3 hours when I could have just throw the ornaments on the tree!

We still laugh about the tree where the ornaments jumped for their lives.....

When I was young, my uncle was a contractor and was working on his house one Christmas. He was a little impulsive and bought a 20' Christmas tree. He cut a big hole in the cieling and stuck the tree up there. He had half the tree in the living room and the top half sticking up into his bedroom. He decorated both halves and essentially got two trees for the price of one. It was a fair amount of work, but the effect was kind of cool...not that I'd do it myself

Jordan

I remember when I was 9yo and my father and I went looking for a Christmas tree, we drove all over the west end of the county trying to find a tree in the countryside, dad started to lose his patience and then he spotted a young pine in a churchyard cemetary along an old country road. I tried to talk him out of it, desperately. I was no longer a believer in St Nick, but I had a philosophy that would allow me the freedom to do anything I wanted and get away with it as long as you didnt mess with God personally. and here we were stealing a tree from the dead(leave them alone too) from a cemetary beside the church.As a 9 yo boy I could just imagine the earful God was getting from these dead people in heaven who were having their tree stolen, at Christmas time no less! When you are supposed to be good for goodness sake! I was still trying to talk my father out of cutting the tree while at the same time telling God mentally that I wanted no part of this and it wasnt my idea and dont hold me responsible! Lo and behold we got the tree home, got it decorated and it was quite the Christmas tree, but I couldnt rest easy knowing we had pinched a tree from a church and then Christmas day came everything went well and I concluded that some how we had either gotten away with it or He wasnt holding me responsible, either way it worked out fine. But man, was I sweating bullets there for a couple of weeks!

That reminds me of a story.

I think it was a couple of years before I was born that a two-story apartment building went up in what was to be my neighbourhood. The planning and construction of this low-rent property caused quite an uproar along the normally quiet street it would soon be facing. My parents and the other neighbours didn't seem to think it would fit in too well. After all, the street was lined on either side by hundred year-old maples, which shaded the stately Victorian-era homes with their sleeping porches, multiple chimneys and garages, many of which were actually updated carriage houses. No, something about this multi-unit structure didn't seem to jive with the people that were already living there. It could have been the in-ground, communal swimming pool they planned to put next to the sidewalk, or the parking lot that would increase traffic at all hours...but I can't say for certain what irked them.

Anyway, the building went up and then I came around shortly afterwards. And yeah, there was quite a bit of traffic zipping in and out of that place as I grew older. What I was reminded of, though, happened one snowy Christmas Eve when I was little. See, our nextdoor neighbours had quite a large yard, and in it was a garden and a lot of nice trees. When Christmas morning came and I was done eviscerating all of my wrapped gifts from underneath our tree, our neighbour came over and told my Dad that at some point during the night, someone had taken a saw to one of the young spruce trees that had been growing in his yard. He also mentioned that he suspected someone from the apartment building. My Dad asked him why this was.

"Well, if you look to the left of the sawdust pile, you'll see the beginnings of a trail of footprints. And green needles, in fact, which were clearly dislodged as the tree was dragged through the freshly-fallen snow...right over to unit 2A over there across the street."

So naturally, the neighbour called the police and although I don't know what happened, they probably arrested some poor kid's well-meaning, yet dim-witted father in front of him that Christmas. Forever scarring him.

And how do I know this? Because... I am that emotionally-scarred, apartment-dwelling little brat!

Ha ha. Sheee-yeahhhh, riiight! I was totally playing with my Ghostbusters toys on a Persian rug in front of a crackling fire that morning! Woot! Thanks again, Santa!

HIT IT, RAY!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4uxI...eature=related