ThePickards
standards, accessibility, and ranting and general stuff by the web chemist

Yes, it’s that time of year again. Last weekend the GLW and I, with assistance from our two lovely children, put up our Christmas tree. Yes, technically it was only the 29th of November and it wasn’t even December yet, but as long as you don’t tell John, we’ll probably get away with it.

This was the first time that I can actually say that the kids helped. Last year they “helped”, but actually caused more work than they carried out. This year they tipped the scales and were actually a benefit.

We have an artificial tree, which we’ve had for three or four years now. It’s about five foot tall, and each of the branches comes off, and different sorts of branches have to be re-attached at different levels. This is fine when it comes to packing the thing away — it packs up quite small. However…

However, when you come to putting the thing up again, you discover that the branches are all mixed up, so you’ve got to sort them out, then move all the furniture around to make a space for the tree, then assemble it, then discover it’s leaning over so you have to climb underneath it to adjust it. And while it doesn’t drop pine needles all over the floor, it does shed little bits of the tinsel-like substance that form the ‘leaves’ on the branches.

And then you end up getting them falling in your mouth when you’re underneath trying to adjust the tree, and you’re choking and spitting them out — because let’s face it you don’t want tinsellitis (groan) — and it’s just generally been hard work and then you’ve got to unwind all the christmas tree lights, and check they are working, and start to wind them around the tree, and then stop to untangle them, and then set them up.

And then just when you think you’re finished, you realise that you’ve left a big gap in the tree, so you need to take all the lights off again, untangle them again, and then put them back on again, only this time being extra careful to spread them out evenly.

And after that, umpteen boxes of decorations appear…

Sigh. Next year, I think I’m just going to get a 5-foot poster of a Christmas tree. That’d be easier. And it’d still look nicer than Peterlee’s tree.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 at 12:19 am and is filed under The Pickards. You can follow responses via my RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.