Senior heritage: O Christmas tree, what a headache

Want a little after-holiday levity? Let me tell you the story of my Christmas tree.

A few years ago I decided to buy a small pre-lit tree.  I looked around a bit and finally walked into a furniture store, saw a beautiful pre-lit Christmas tree, bought it and struggled to get it into our truck.  It took both of us to lug it into the house.  I thought to myself, perhaps I have made a mistake. This thing weighs a ton. We might not be able to handle it when we get older and less strong.  Oh well!

We put the little tree up in our living room. There was no room for anything else so we moved it to the dining room.  Well, it looked small in the store.

Each year I have looked for a new place to sit the Christmas tree to benefit the beauty of it and to allow us to still fit in the house. Nothing worked. So, this year I put it on the front porch.

I thought that way I wouldn't even have to decorate it. The white lights should be sufficient. But, I couldn't leave well enough alone. So I tucked a few artificial poinsettia stems within the limbs. It was pretty nice. And then came a big gust of wind, everything went down and we had poinsettia stems all over the front yard.

We picked the poinsettias up along with the tree, tried to anchor it and thought we had been successful. Wrong! The tree went down again. We picked it up once more, tied it down and I thought a few more decorations might be more attractive.  So I made big red bows and attached them to each limb but I didn't have enough ribbon. So it looked sparse.

I thought I could live with it. But, I was not satisfied and then another gust of wind came and down it went. It, by now, had become a ritual, every morning we would get up and erect the fallen tree on our front porch.

I woke up one morning at 4:30 thinking about that no-hassle tree which was now giving me nightmares and it was not yet Christmas.  At 4:30 a.m., I went out and sat the tree up, anchored it, took off all the bows, all the poinsettia stems, made new smaller bows, arranged the stems and vowed not to do another thing to that tree and I haven't.

The tree is, even as I write this, laying on our front porch and my husband just said to me, "That tree is going in the trash!"

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