O Christmas Tree

First off I need to apologize for my absence this week. Things have been nuts since last Friday for me and it seems that by the time I am able to sit down every night I am way to tired to get on the computer. Really everything started going down hill last Friday and things just keep heading that way.

Last Friday when I got home from work I opened a bottle of wine and started putting our Christmas Tree up. Growing up my mom always procrastinated on getting the tree up so we usually ended up with only a few weeks with it. The first Christmas that Dave and I lived together we put the tree up the day after Thanksgiving and it has been that way ever since.

So I get the tree all put together and looking perfect then I plug the cord in and nothing happens. I start to panic a little and frantically go through the whole tree to make sure I got all the different strands plugged in together. We have one of those pre-lit trees so all your supposed to do is plug them into each other and then into the wall. All of my plugs were together but nothing was lighting up. I decided to call Dave and see if he had any ideas of what might be wrong and he suggested I go through and replace some of the fuses. I went through and replaced every single fuse on the tree and still nothing. I new it couldn't be because of a burnt out light because these lights are the ones where if one burns out it's the only one that doesn't come on. I called Dave back in complete meltdown phase because I knew we didn't have the money to buy a new tree, or at least not one I would really like, but in my crazy state I couldn't figure out what we were going to do with no light's on our tree.

(I should explain that it was 7:00pm and I had been up since 4:30am and worked a full 8 hours, so my mind was all functioning at that point)

Now Dave being the logical one says to me "well I guess we are just going to have to pull all of them off and put regular strands of lights on". So I took the tree apart and I started with the top section. Again my mind not being at full capacity I sat there and twisted every hook holding the strands of lights on to get them off which not only took FOREVER but killed my fingers. An hour and half later when Dave got home from work he picks up the middle section and just starts pulling and the stupid clips are popping off left and right. I worked for about another 30 minutes before I called it quits for the night and went to bed. Of course I got up the next morning and spent another couple of hours getting the rest of the lights off and the tree back up. This is where everything stopped.

Having a pre-lit tree meant we did not own any regular strands of lights so we needed to go and get some but that wasn't possible since payroll screwed. See Dave was supposed to get his check on Friday but the ladies in his payroll department didn't get it turned in on time before the Holiday so no one got there checks until Monday. This meant for the first year in 8 years my tree was not up and complete over Thanksgiving weekend.

We were able to go to Target Monday night to get the lights and then finally Tuesday night after dinner the kids and I put all the lights and decorations on it. I am very proud of myself this year because I let the kids put up most of the ornaments and I haven't gone through and moved very many of them. I am a major perfectionist when it comes to things like this and usually have to have all the ornaments spread out evenly. The only ornaments I have moved have been breakable ones that they put at the very bottom.

So what do you think? Was it worth all the hassel this year?