Tree Acrobats

Last weekend when the tree and all the decorations went up the house was teeming with activity and chaos. After all the decorations were hung on house and tree, Raif and I gave each other a high five and collapsed into the couch. A successful Christmas launch without a single disaster.

It wasn't until a day or so later my Mom was cleaning up around the tree and asked the simple question "Did you ever water the tree?" Hmmmm, I didn't but I am sure that my husband did and so I checked. Fuck. The tree was bone dry. After interrogating the whole family I realized that no one had watered the tree. Double fuck. I went online and read that a tree needs water within a few hours of cutting otherwise it develops a layer of sap on the bottom that water cannot penetrate. Considering the tree had gone without water for like 36 hours I was pretty certain that if that sap layer was going to form it was already there. But Raif and I took the positive outlook approach and watered it anyway. Surely the water level would go down and so we waited and waited. It was akin to sitting in the ICU to see whether someone was going to live or die. Every once in awhile we uttered "Check to see if it has gone down." And so we would do our precise measuring of putting our fingers in and attempting to remember how high the water was the last time. "Oh, I think it has gone down a little" we would say but after 24 hours even we realized that the tree was about to be moved from the ICU to the morgue.

So what do we do? Our first instinct was to do nothing and see if it would last until December 26th but then the thought of having a brown tree Christmas morning left a little something to be desired. The kids would notice a new tree, so that was out. So our only option was to cut the bottom of this one off.

Now how do we manage that? The easy solution was to take the ornaments off the tree, cut it and redecorate. Normally that would have worked but my children, particularly Greyson, have become very fond of their ornaments. Every afternoon after school he heads straight to that tree and points to each and every ornament he put up and tells me that he put it up and some story about it. "Mommy, do you see my Choo-choo ornament? It's on its way to Kansas."

Clearly, I would never remember where every ornament was, I can barely remember what I had for breakfast. And so we took a great leap of faith....

I took the most fragile ornaments off - the ones that Raif and I had put on. We took all the dog beds from around the house and circled the tree with them. And then with ornaments on, I lifted the tree out of the stand and my darling husband hacked the bottom of it off with his saw. My shoulders ached from holding that 7 foot tree up. My backed burned from the incessant vibrations from that saw and I sweated profusely over the thought of any of my children's precious ornaments breaking.

Believe it or not, we actually did it. The tree was cut and put back in place without even a minor incident (well except for the large amounts of sap that ended up on Raif. He still smells piney fresh) and the children are none the wiser. The tree started sucking up water like there was no tomorrow and was moved out of the ICU.

Now lets hope we can remember to water it for the next 3 weeks. Perhaps we should have gotten the fake tree.....