The Minnesota Farm Woman

I finally decorated the house for Christmas a few days ago, something that I have been putting off since the first of the month. I decided to keep things easy and simple this year, since we are not hosting either of the two family get-togethers, nor are we expecting a lot of company. I thought about just using the smallish pre-lit artificial tree rather than getting a fresh tree and not using more than a few of the 1,043 ornaments we must have by now. As I pulled the tree out of the rather smooshed-up box, I realized that the stand was missing. It is a stand specific to that tree, and after looking aroud the basement with no luck, I decided that it might work with our regular tree stand. I searched high and low in the basement and garage and even behind the woodpile outside to no avail. Both stands were missing. No worries, though. On to Plan B: I would just use the small tabletop tree, which would look great on the antique fern stand that came from my parents’ house. I brought that up from the basement as well as a plastic tote full of decorations. I had just replaced the small string of lights on the little tree last year, so it should be good to go, except….they didn’t work. Luckily, they came with a bag of replacement lights and fuses. Unluckily, I couldn’t remove even the first bulb from the string, so I replaced the miniscule fuses after first searching for my bifocals and a tweezers to do so. They still didn’t work, so I threw the whole lot in the trash. Luckily, I remembered that I had purchased a small strand of lights last month to use in decorating a sweater for the Ugly Sweater Contest at work, but just never got around to. Unluckily, they needed three AA batteries and the battery drawer only contained AAA batteries. By now, I was starting to lose a little bit of my Christmas spirit. Back to Plan A. I figured that the stand was perhaps packed into one of the three large totes which are stored in the basement 11 months out of the year. I checked the tote that I hauled up earlier, and found that it contained a few cookie plates, old candles, and a gigantic mass of tangled lights in all shapes and sizes. The ghosts of Christmases past. These totes are heavy, and I usually have HIM haul them up for me, but he was nowhere to be found. I hauled the second, and then the third up the stairs. By now I was beginning to sweat, and had not even the smallest iota of holly jolly Christmas left in this tired old body. I finally found the tree stand at the bottom of the last tote I checked. I put the tree up in record time, fluffed the branches, threw on a few ornaments, and plugged it in. The way things had been going, I fully expected the lights not to work, but they were perfect, every single one of them. With a warm crackling fire and a simple little tree, the holly and even a little bit of the jolly were starting to creep back in. Until HE came home. Looking at all the totes and Christmas mess spread around the living room, he said, “You didn’t have to haul EVERYTHING up. Since nobody’s coming over for Christmas, we can keep things a lot more simple this year!” Sigh. Pass the eggnog.