Oh, Christmas Tree!

I mentioned that we used to do real trees before inheriting a fake one from my older sister. However, what I didn't mention is our year that we WISHED we had a fake tree. I figure you can all use a humorous story right about now ... (This from an e-mail I sent out back in 2001)

All~ I'm thinking by now that you may have heard our horror Christmas-tree story. For those of you who haven't, here is the short version:

Paul's family has a tradition of cutting down their own tree (there are a lot of places here in Seattle to do that) and drinking hot chocolate. Well, we planned to go with them Saturday morning to cut our own.

Friday night we received a call from Olan Mills saying the pictures we had taken of Tyler had something wrong with the film, so we needed to come back in. We wanted them in time for Christmas, so we had to go in Saturday morning for re-takes. That meant we had to trust Paul's family to pick out our Christmas tree.

Now, Paul was a little worried since he said his mom likes to get them too tall, and his dad always picks ones with holes. I saw their two trees last year, and they seemed fine enough. However, he told his dad to make sure to get one no taller than Paul's mom. He also said to look around for holes. The next morning when I talked to Paul's mom, I said the same things. I even threw in a pitch about how we really wished we could come since this would be our FIRST Christmas tree, but that we had to get these pictures taken.

Well, when they delivered the tree on Saturday night, let's just say it was NOT what we were expecting. I'm not sure if you could say there are any holes, because that's pretty much all the tree is. (We're still trying to decide if we should water it or just let it die ....) Anyway, I haven't seen Paul's mom in a few days, but apparently she's had a growth spurt: We had to cut off five feet to fit it into our house.

Paul keeps saying we're not related to Charlie Brown, so I'm not sure why we had to get a Charlie Brown Christmas tree. When I told my dad, he said, "Well, at least you won't have to try to improve on this year's tree since ANY tree will be an improvement." So true!

Here are two of the pics I attached:


On this one you can see that we tried to place ONE ornament on the branch, and it was too much. So, we were sans ornaments with this tree:


My co-workers had a heyday and made sure to forward this e-mail to everyone on our team and even our client back East. Here are some responses I got from the pictures:

- "Think of it this way Denise, at least it won't shed pine needles all over your floor. At least Tyler isn't old enough to realize your tree is a little sparse."

- "Oh my gosh, Denise! I can't quit laughing! That is way worse than anything I could possibly have even begun to think of. Yuck!! H ow can you even call that a tree? I'm SO sorry, but this will make for a great personal history story!!! :)"

- "So was that the Christmas tree in the pics? If it was, I liked it. I guess his family was feeling a bit lazy and did not want to carry the thing. Either that or they pulled a heavy dose of sarcastic humor. I noticed that the thing did not have any ornaments -- looked too frail for any."

Mid-January I got an e-mail marked urgent from our client. It said, "I have an important project for you ... I was told you have a very interesting Christmas tree story with photos. I was told I must see this project!" Her response upon seeing the pictures? "Oh my! I can't believe that! I can only imagine what your first impression was ... to laugh or cry. Hey at least you were able to capture the moment. And as your father said, you will only have room to improve. Were you able to decorate the tree or would it fall with ornaments?"

Here's hoping your tree is better than ours was in 2001. :)