Will it ever get easy?

Time to get the Christmas tree up. OK, where does one get a Christmas tree? No Kroger here... and the grocery stores are serious about selling food this time of year, they could not be bothered by dealing with trees too. That’s the job of the florist, of course! The problem was, that the trees we kept seeing were only about 3 feet tall. That’s like a Texas-sized houseplant, and on top of that... they are dead! Might as well get a houseplant and keep it from year to year. In fact, I used to have a Norfolk Pine as tall as I am.

So as I was walking by the florist the other day, I noticed that they no longer had 3 foot trees... they had all grown to a reasonable size. Oh, I thought, now they are getting serious about this. So I told Paul to drag one home after work one day. He came home empty-handed. Nice try, he said... No tall trees there, they just propped them up on things! So the hunt continued...he later found a tree about 15 blocks away and drug it home the other night.

It was my job to find the lights for the tree. I went to the big giant walmart-type store and they seemed to have a nice system. Each type of light strand was hanging from the ceiling with a number next to it. Then the shelves were labeled with numbers. But did you actually think that the boxes would be in the right places??? Could they have just numbered the boxes themselves so that when they got misplaced, you would at least know what you are buying? Attempt #1 can be seen in the picture below. I bought something that looks like it would indeed fit on a Texas-sized tree... where do they put these things??? Surely not on a 3-foot tree??

Attempt #2 went like this... we met at the mall late one day after work. There wasn’t much time, but this was clearly a two-person job since I had failed miserably when doing the task single-handedly. This time we went to a hardware/bed bath and beyond type store... BHV. They were pretty much wiped out of lights... what we did find were strands of a single color.. you could buy red, green, or blue lights. I found a single pack of white lights so we bought that and left. We got home and it wasn’t a string at all, it was a loop of lights. Hard to explain and harder to put on the tree... so last night after my French class I went back to BHV to try again.

Attempt #3 scored a pack of colored, single-strand lights. BHV had restocked. Voila!