It's just a tree

For the first 20 years of marriage we used the same fake tree that I bought on sale at Spiegel catalog. We finally retired it after many years of good service.

I wanted the smell of fresh tree in the house for the holidays. You can smell that wonderful pine as soon as you walk in the house. We did that for 3 years. Watering every day, vacuuming everyday and disposal were less than wonderful. So the warm glow of Christmas wore off pretty quick.

We went to a larger fake tree with the lights already on it. Hmm, that sure eliminates a lot of the burned out bulbs on strings angst that happens every year. We love that tree, set up is easy. It only takes a few minutes to arrange the branchs to cover the bare spots made by laying flat for 11 months in the garage. Then we decorate it with our wonderful decorations. I have decos from our first Christmas together (1976), baby's first Christmas (1980 and 1982), and when the kids were boys in school. Every year Terry has been faithful about buying an ornament that represents that year for us. Some light up, some bubble and some are engraved with names and significant dates.

So we set up the tree. But the ornaments are in Hyloft garage storage that we could not reach thanks to our newest addition to the garage, our son's sand dune buggy (plus trailer). Undaunted, Terry went out and got 3 new ornaments for the tree for this year. We figured that we would get our son to come over and move his dune buggy and grab our decorations stored above it. Great idea.

Jake (son), Dana (wife), and 3 grands came over this week-end looking for their fake Christmas tree stored, where else?, at my house. After moving things (read dune buggy) around, they retrieved our box of decorations from the high storage area and found their tree. They did not find their decorations. Hmmmm.

Yeah, I know, but they need decorations and we do not. So they hesitantly took our box of decorations. My grands need to see our family decos on a tree. I loved that idea. Besides we just bought 3 new decos, right? And where are those new decos....