The Holidays Are Magical
I should be hung up by my thumbs for some of the loose and lazy thinking on my part this weekend. Indeed, sometimes the best made plans go catastrophically awry. Certainly, chief amongst those poorly thought out weekend schemes was the idea that I might save a few Christmas dollars by chopping down my own tree on my dad’s property for regal display at the Ranch. I had imagined a tree display that would make local headlines. What I got was something that would make even Charlie Brown cry.

My dad’s property doesn’t lack for evergreen trees. There’s thousands of ’em. Unfortunately, through years of Christmas commercialization, we’ve all got a good idea of what makes a proper Christmas tree. It’s about six and a half feet tall with a straight stem, it’s shaped like a nice tapered triangle, and dense as hell. For good or ill, those are the proper measurements. My tree looks like a gawky stringy teenager who grew too fast for her feet and has trouble with the whole balance thing.

Somehow, when hunting for a tree I lost all sense of scale and domestic proportions. The tree I brought home measured 15 1/2 feet from head to tail, which, when properly set up meant that the top five feet of the tree ran across the ceiling like some ridiculous Dr. Seuss drawing. After trimming it down to a more manageable eight feet, the thing was a hopeless embarrassment – a mean caricature of ‘Holiday Spirit’.

To make matters worse, ALL Christmas tree stands are sold out around town! The only thing I was able to purchase was a lonely stand on some back shelf at Fred Meyer. And even though it clearly stated on the box: “For Trees Up To 7 Feet Tall”, I bought the fucking thing anyway. I was desperate. Turns out they weren’t kidding about the 7 Feet thing. My trees continual refusal to stand properly means that this afternoon I will be feeding the entire thing face first into my fireplace. Then I will pay the neighbor kid $50 to go to the Boy Scouts Tree Farm and buy me a $100 Christmas Tree.