The higher the tree, the closer to heaven

I am proud to announce that we are the owners of a real live Christmas tree that is going to spend the rest of its short-lived days bedecked in lights in the comfort of our living room. We went to pick it out Tuesday afternoon about 5:00 p.m. and I believe it’s the fastest we’ve ever all agreed on a tree. I mentioned this to P as we climbed in his truck with the tree in the back and he said, “If we don’t have this whole process figured out after seventeen years of marriage then there’s no hope.” It’s a valid point.

He carried it into the house and we began the process of getting it secured in the stand. But we had an issue. It was too tall for our living room and the top of it scraped across our ceiling. P looked at me and asked, “Don’t we have nine foot ceilings?”

“Yes! And the tree should fit! It was in the 8-9 foot category!”

He looked at me blankly and replied, “Well either they measured wrong or our ceiling aren’t nine feet.”

And then he may have mumbled something along the lines of “you and your obsession with a tall tree” as he walked out to the backyard to get his hedge clippers to lop off the excess height. He climbed on a stepladder, chopped off about eight inches and announced, “Well, there’s the extra $49.99 we paid for lying on the living room floor.”

So I guess what we’ve actually figured out after seventeen years of marriage is that my eyes are always bigger than my living room when it comes to Christmas trees and P has just learned to humor me and wield his hedge clippers as necessary.

Here’s our tree in its current undecorated state except for the star on top.

See how the top point of the star touches the ceiling just like sweet Baby Jesus intended?

That’s all I’m saying.

(Also, those are P’s feet in the bottom corner of the picture because I am an excellent photographer.)

Anyway, tomorrow I will begin the arduous process of covering it in lights because there is nothing that really brings out the perfectionist in me like making sure the tree is evenly covered with sufficient wattage and then when Caroline gets home from school we’ll hang all our ornaments and drape some garland. In the meantime, I’m going to make myself quit looking at all the various Christmas home tours on the internet because they’ll make me believe it might be feasible to create beautiful handmade ornaments using nothing but deer antlers, white paint, gold glitter and a Jedi mind trick.

Piper and Mabel are leery of the few decorations I’ve put out thus far. Mabel feels like the stockings hung by the chimney with care are basically a front for a ring of thieves and likes to give them the side eye every time she walks by.

This past Sunday I had Caroline and her friend Sadie cut out a bunch of paper snowflakes for me because I wanted to hang them from the kitchen windows. And when Piper came in the house, she laid in her bed and growled at them like they were a menace to our home. Which I guess explains why she took the first opportunity to grab one of the ones I left on the countertop and tear it to shreds.

It was evil and must be destroyed.

(Side note: I saw the snowflake idea on Pinterest and it had me at hello. And, yes, I basically ran a snowflake sweat shop in my kitchen on Sunday afternoon with free child labor but in my defense I told them they could quit cutting snowflakes as soon as they mentioned the scissors were beginning to give them blisters.)

(I promise I’ll post a picture of it at some point but it’s not finished yet. Also, it would require me to get up and walk in the kitchen to take a photo.)

With any luck all our inside decorations will be finished by tomorrow night. Which will be a nice contrast to the rotting pumpkins and dead mums on our front porch.