Decorating the Christmas tree has been quite the adventure this year. It all started just before Halloween.
You see, I had this grandiose idea that we could make all of our ornaments this year and have an old-fashioned (except for the lights and the lighted angel on top) Christmas tree. We were going to string popcorn and make all of these wonderful, homemade ornaments. So before Halloween, I started collecting ideas. My mom gave me some really great ones, too. But, I only implemented one of them. She told me how to make these really wonderful string ornaments using crochet thread, balloons, and liquid starch. First of all, I thought crochet thread was yarn. Mom crochets and was a little put-off by my ignorance. Once she set me straight, I went to the store to get the thread, balloons, and starch.
I came home with the thread (not yarn), balloons, and liquid starch, and Ben and I blew up an entire bag of balloons.Thirty balloons. Because I'm overambitious like that. And because I way overestimated my children's ability to do and to remain focused on these ornaments. I think Hayden might have done part of one. Abby might have done an entire one and started a few others, which I finished. I did the rest. All 13 of them.
Once they dried and it was time to pop the balloons and remove them from the thread, I discovered that I didn't effectively communicate to the kids. I told them to hold the balloon near the knot and wrap the thread around the balloon. What I didn't tell them was not to wrap the thread around the knot. Over and over and over. You see, once the balloon is popped, it should just easily come out of the ornament. Only it doesn't work that way if the thread, which was fully soaked in liquid starch and has now dried quite hard, is wrapped tightly around the balloon knot. So I had to cut several ornaments. This left a gaping hole in the ornament. So, those ornaments got thrown away. We were left with a few ornaments.
I just realized that I haven't told you WHY I had this wonderful idea for making ornaments this year. Last year, we celebrated our first Christmas in our house. Previously, we lived in a two-bedroom townhouse. With carpet in every room. Our house has hardwood flooring in the living room and the hallway. The only carpet is in the bedrooms. Why is this a problem, you ask? Because 99% of our ornaments were glass ornaments. That wasn't a problem when we lived in a fuly-carpeted apartment. Even with two kids and a dog. However, when we went to decorate our tree last year, I had just a little bit of foresight and said to Ben, "Don't you think we should go buy some shatter-proof ornaments? Almost all of ours are breakable." Ben said, "No, they'll be fine. The kids just need to learn to leave the tree alone." (The dog didn't make the move to the new house; he lives with my in-laws now due to Hayden's allergies.) From the day that we decorated the Christmas tree until the day we took it down, I swept up at least one broken ornament a day. Thus the need for new ornaments.
Back to this year: We finally got our Christmas tree this past Saturday. We usually get our tree Thanksgiving weekend, but we were a week late this year. There was a tree at the tree farm that we all fell in love with. It was this beautiful blue spruce that had the perfect Christmas tree shape and, according to Abby, "lots of room for loot!" (Guess we need to really hammer home the true reason we celebrate Christmas and that it's better to give than to receive.) When we found out the price of the beautiful blue spruce, we decided that we'd better choose another tree! So we found a wonderful Norway spruce that is just as beautifully shaped as the blue spruce and has "lots of room for loot" because of Ben's trimming job once we got the tree home. Some of the lower branches had to be trimmed so that the tree would actually get into the tree stand; he just got a little carried away. It kind of reminded me of that "I Love Lucy" episode where Lucy kept telling Ricky to trim a little here and a little there... and eventually there was nothing left to the tree! (Okay, so it wasn't quite that bad, but I do think that Ben actually thought for a minute that he would have to go buy another tree.)
Once we had the tree in the stand, it was time to put the lights on the tree. Only we had to go buy lights because ours from last year were no longer safe; Ben had to splice them together to make them work. The tree had been decorated for a couple of weeks when about half of them decided to work intermittently, and there was no way that we were going to take everything off of the tree so we could put new lights on. So the old lights went out with last year's Christmas tree. Saturday afternoon, I went to Walmart to buy lights because we had none. So I bought this box of 400 lights, took them home, and we tested them. They all worked. Got them on the tree, and half of one string (there were two strings total) quit working. Ben found out that it was a connector issue, not a bulb issue, so he took the lights back to Walmart and got some new ones. He had to get four boxes of 100 lights each because they had no more boxes of 400 lights. He tested each string, and only three strings worked. (Figures.) We were optimistic that three strings would be enough to cover the tree. Um, wrong! There was about 18 inches of tree that didn't have any lights. By this time the kids were tired and really, really wanted to decorate the tree, so we let them put a couple of ornaments each on the tree and told them that we'd get one more string of lights after church on Sunday and we'd finish decorating the tree.
Sunday, we went straight to Walmart after church let out (thankfully, we went to the early service) and got our string of lights. We came home, had a quick lunch, and set to decorating the tree. We discovered once we opened up the boxes of ornaments and Christmas decorations that we had this nice, unopened box of FOUR HUNDRED LIGHTS in with our Christmas decorations! It was then that Ben and I remembered that we had gone to Kmart after Christmas last year and bought lights on sale. Because we knew we would need them this year. And because we were saving ourselves some money by doing this.
After getting over the initial disgust of this finding, we started decorating the tree. We found out that we had quite a few unbreakable ornaments after all, and there were a bunch of applesauce ornaments that Abby and I made a few years ago, and then the few string ornaments that survived to be decorated with, and then the two boxes of candy canes. All in all, the decorations on the tree look really pretty this year. I think this is one of my favorite trees in our 11 years of marriage.
Then came Hayden's favorite part: putting the angel on the tree and lighting it. Once we finally got the angel on the tree, we discovered that she didn't work. Talk about frustrating! So Ben and Hayden went off to Walmart to buy another angel for the tree while the girls and I stayed here. Ruth was napping, Abby got on the phone with my mom, and I swept pine needles from the floors. The boys came back with a beautiful angel, and it works! :)
While in the moment, everything seemed to go wrong, I can look back and see the humor in it all. It is definitely a Christmas we won't soon forget!
Next on the agenda is to spend time during the next few weeks teaching and reiterating the whole reason we celebrate Christmas...
