Wednesday, December 5, 2007

My Maggie


After much debating over whether we should purchase a sassy lime green fake tree, a vintage aluminum tree, or a traditional real one.... we opted for the latter. After last year's expensive, ugly, last minute real tree purchase we wanted to give real trees another chance... I know my mother must have insisted upon real trees every year for a reason!


Besides, now we own a shop-vac to suck up all those needles.


For family night we purchased the tree and set it up in its stand, then it was good-night to Maggie, homework for Dan, and Fabulous Decorating Time for Megs. We were limited in our number of light strands, so I couldn't be as thorough as my mother always is. And my ornament collection is not as grandiose as I hope it will someday be. But I'm quite pleased with how it turned out.




After sitting for a good half hour staring at my "clean, well-lighted" tree I began to realize that the next day Maggie would wake up and as usual wreak havoc on the place. What would become of my tree? Would yanking the lights off and throwing the ornaments become her new favorite game? Like ripping off our book covers and taking our VHS tapes out of their cases?

Turns out, I didn't need to worry. The next morning we played in her room until I got brave and opened the door. I plugged in the tree and watched her mouth form into that perfect little "o" reserved for surprise occassions such as those. She ran up to the tree and batted at a branch. I followed up with a firm "No!" She burst into tears and ran to hug me.




She's only touched it one time since with the exact same reaction. I know its only been 2 1/2 days with the tree but I'm dang happy there hasn't been a single ornamental casualty.
p.s. I still want an aluminum tree, isn't it awesome?

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Megs,

I totally want to see a picture. I absolutely love how your house is decorated at Christmas and I'm sure your tree is just as cool.

Tiffany said...

I was just going to say the same thing--POST A PICTURE!!! I'd love to see it too!!
and good job Mags for not breaking any ornaments! I hope your tree survives the rest of Christmas!! I'm sure it will! :)

Anonymous said...

I only pulled the Christmas tree down once when I was a toddler. So if it does happen, my encouraging support would be...it will be a family bonding moment later in life when you are all grown up and sharing memories.."remember that one year when Maggie pulled down the Christmas tree and..." It will be lots of laughs. Go ahead, let her try! Wink Wink (gracefully spoken by someone who has no children)

K said...

I think our cat took our ancient fake tree down once. But not one of the kids ever pulled on the tree - as Char points out "We couldn't get near doing that - or we would have lost fingers - or other essential limbs."

An ALUMINIUM tree? I shoulda known. We used to drive around our LA neighborhood when I was a kid, staring at dressed up houses, and every time we passed one of those aluminium things - with the rotating color wheel - we were torn between horrible fascination and horrible mockery.

Funk is one thing, but for me, Christmas is romance. Aluminium ( I am told my spelling is European - I think it's just wrong) is not romantic. Even after it has wrapped thanksgiving sweet potatoes.

That said, we have succumbed to a fake tree. We did it the year Cammon left for his mission - I had not half enough spirit left to face lighting a real tree - a six hour job at least every year that always ended up frying the tree and giving me house-fire nightmares. So we stopped on the way home from the airport (leaving Cammon behind - well, not really; by that time, he was over Missouri or something) and shopped Modern Display, where we found giganto-tree, which has been retired because we are too weak and puny to handle it ourselves anymore, what with our great age and disinclination for discomfort.

A new tree meant another eight hours of lighting (I keep swearing I'm going to simplify, and then I don't do it. And giganto took twelve hours- at least) but every year, I only have to suffer another two or three, replacing strings that somehow magically just stop working, even though nobody's touched them for a year.

Ummm. This is too long, huh?

Maybe if I just got a revolving color wheel -

Emily Rasmussen said...

I wish I had as much luck. My tree is completely bare from the point Bridger can reach to and down. And two ornaments have met their untimely death already. We didn't even pull out our glass ornaments. We'll save those ones until Bridger is five I guess! :0) Cute tree!

Jenae said...

Nice work Williams! It amazes me how much fun it is to decorate your own Christmas tree AND how much pride we can have in our work afterwards!

Camie said...

You tree is so cute! I totally know what you mean though--- I find every day the ornaments disappear or I slowly am putting ornaments just on the top (out of the kids reach)

Ginna said...

I want an aluminum tree so bad, they are so cool. But i LOVE live trees too. Yours looks gorgeous! I love it.
And that's great that so far Mags has been cool about the tree. Max was terrible, and he's still pretty bad. No amount of yelling or berating helps. So last year or was it the year before? Anyway one year I went and bought a whole bunch of jingle bells and put them all over the tree instead of all my mom's lovely handmade ornaments, and that worked out well.
I'm going to post my tree pictures in a couple of days.
Yay for christmas trees! And cute baby girls and cute moms!

Tiffany said...

Were the pics there before and they just didn't work!? WEIRD! Anyway- I like the tree!! GOOD JARB! (that's a quote from Homestar Runner!)

{Erica} said...

Love the tree and loved the story. A firm "NO!" here at our house works wonders!

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