The story of last year’s Christmas tree started more than 3 years ago.

Suddenly, like I have already told you, the elk ranch didn’t sell Christmas trees any longer and it was incredibly difficult to find decent trees.  The other thing was, I – together with my partner in crime, Carol Cherriez took care of the annual benefit Christmas Ball for the local hospital 2 years in a row and had no time to look for a tree and decorate it in time to make it worth it – it took a lot of time to pull that Ball together which always takes place on the first Saturday in December.  Needless to say, the Saturday after Thanksgiving came and went and no one thought of Christmas trees or anything else for that matter until the Ball was done and over with.

So, last year I didn’t fool around with the Ball but for some reason I could not get Mike to go with me to look for a tree.  Finally I got just a tiny bit bent out of shape and drove over to Victoria’s Floral Design in Benzonia and there was this HUGE blue spruce.  HUGE is maybe an understatement, the thing was huge.  We measured and I walked around it a few times. It had been cut and deposited in the driveway in front of the store.  It was laying halfway in the snow and it was frozen in place.  LuAnn was with me and there were 3 sales people plus a driver in the store – we had enough people to yank that tree loose and get it onto LuAnn’s truck.
Weeeell, it wasn’t as easy as that.  We yanked and yanked. We even broke some branches. After about 30 minutes of yanking, the tree was tied to the truck.  Yikes, it was very big.  We got it to the front porch and there we noticed how big that thing really was.
Hmmmm….”that’s easy” said Mike, we’ll cut as much of the tree as we want off the top and use the lower branches for decorations around the house. Great.  Mike measured and cut.
I did some chores and when I came back into the living room, there was ….what?  “Where’s the tree?”  Ummmmm….I don’t know what Mike measured, I know that what I saw was the very top of the tree and then one layer of branches and that was that. The entire thing no higher than 4 feet including the 12 inch long stick that made up the top. You know, the stick that you make the angel sit on.  In our case it’s a spaceship not an angel.  I could actually look down on this “tree”.

Oh boy….what a disappointment.

So we got down some of the Christmas ornaments and doodads and I started to decorate the pitiful thing. And after a few of my crystal icicles on there, I could not go on.  I took off my gloves and sat in front of it and looked at it to see what could be done to save it.   I did that for about 4 days and then I took off the few icicles that I had hung on it and threw the tree with the tree stand outside, onto the porch, where it stayed until spring clean-up.

The funny thing is, none of my people ever mentioned the tree.

No one ever said anything about that tree not

being where they had left it for me, ready to be decorated.

They all thought it would go away if they didn’t say anything.

But it is still here.

In my mind.

In their minds.

Never to be forgotten and never to be repeated or else!

Muahahahahaha

No matter what, I am 100% certain that I will bake and decorate Christmas Cookies even this year.

YUMMMMMMM

.

And we’ll have something yummy to drink too.