O, Christmas Tree

So, it's been interesting preparing for Christmas. It all started with the gingerbread house. Which I have never, ever (as craftish as I am) even attempted. But they had those houses on sale at the craft store, looking all neat-o and cool and fun on the box, and Chicklet wanted one, and how can you say no to that face?

Well, first of all, the "icing" comes as this powdered stuff that they tell you to add (and this is no lie) 5 tablespoons of water too. And that's it! And we're talking something like 2+ cups of powdered sugar and whatever other chemicals they've added. That stuff wasn't even remotely wet, let alone pasty. 1.5 cups of water later, we had something resembling "toothpaste" consistency (which is what the recipe called for). Then they want to to assemble the bottom of the house - wait one hour - and then the roof - wait one hour - and then begin to do the remaining decorating. Ummmm, who has that kind of time? So, of course, we didn't wait. And, nothing bad happened. It all stayed together as planned, and the roof didn't even slide off. And we all had fun putting candy haphazardly where we thought it would hide cracks. (Incidentally, they tell you, right in the directions, not to worry about breaking the pieces, because you can always cover it with icing. Even though you know, you know, it will never end up looking like the box if you do that.) We also discovered that both the gingerbread and the candies taste awful. I don't know how they managed to make candy taste bad, but they do. Maybe it's not really candy.

So, a few weeks later we went to get the Christmas tree at a cut-it-yourself place a mile from our house. We needed a white pine, ask my husband about that. Now, this is one of the two tree farms in our county that has white pines, and the other one is 30 minutes away. Of course, his trees start at 10 feet high. So Wally picks one that is 20 feet tall and chops away. It takes a tractor to pull it to the Jeep, and 3 men to load it on top. We get it home, and cut a bit off the bottom, and then drag it to the porch and up the steps, and then he says, "I don't know if we're going to be able to get it through the front door." At this point, I'm tired, and we are getting that tree through the door whether it likes it or not. We did, and now it takes up half the living room. And the dog is refraining from dining on the lights, like she did last year. However, she must feel that the tree is still too big, because she is slowly eating off all the bottom branches, and working her way up the tree. Every few days I come home and a few more ornaments are on the floor, and a little bit more of the tree trunk is visible.

We had more fun with painting last night. Back to the craft store again, they had ornaments and things on sale, so we got those and painted them. I've entitled it "Picasso's reindeer" by Chickie.