This year has been a real struggle to get my act together for Christmas.
I’m late getting my rum balls made. I’m late getting my gifts wrapped. I’m late getting my cards out. The only thing I have NOT been late for, is putting extra holiday pounds on. I’ve nailed that. You could even say I’m early.
How many Xs can you put on a dress size before it’s obnoxious?
Never mind. I don’t really want to think about it.
I’ve had a problem getting the lights up on the Big Blue Spruce that is out in front of the Little Cottage this year. It’s always been a production, because of the height of the glorious evergreen that the previous owners of the Little Cottage kindly planted over a decade ago, but this year the height is proving to be too much for our little operation. We have long poles, but not-long-enough poles.
You see the evergreen behind the moose? That’s the one we light. It’s the only thing outside that we light, and we tend to do it RIGHT. Like, a kagillion lights go on that thing. No joke.
This year I begged some neighbors who have bigger apparatus to help us. One of our neighbors owns a sign company, and I asked him if he could use his cherry picker to help us reach the top. But guess what….the guy has a LIFE, and I can’t get him to drop everything to service my tree! I have a feeling if I could get him to squeeze us into his busy schedule, his wife might have a thing or two to say about getting their own lights up!
Then I did something REALLY stupid. In a fit of holiday excitement, I bet the son of another neighbor, who owns one of the orchards near us, Lewis Orchards, that we could light our tree with more lights than he would light the Lewis Orchards trees with.
We agreed that if I won at the end of Christmas, I would get to demand his help with getting our tree lit next year. And if I lost, I have to make him extra rum balls this year.
You’d think that would be motivation enough for My Captain and I
to get the dang thing done.
But the weather has been cruddy, and my attitude has not been exactly elf-like, and so the beautiful Big Blue Spruce in front of the little cottage only has the bottom half strung with lights. The lights only go up as far as the not-long-enough poles will reach. I’m telling you, it looks half-dressed. That’s about par for the course with me this year…..
I’m considering just putting ALL of the lights on the bottom half. Technically I could still win the bet, because we never said HOW I would ‘light it up!’ more than he did. We were talking volume, not aesthetics.
Just picture a kagillion lights on just the bottom half of the tree. It might not be pretty, but it might just win me the help for next year. What do you think?
Don’t judge.
Mama Boe 