A Heart for a Tree

Today I took down my Christmas tree.

To be fair, I've been planning on it for a while now, but a few key events altered it from the ever-existing petrified sculpture in the corner to a 5 foot tall blazing inferno in all but deed. A) My mother came for a visit and actually entered the apartment and B) Whichever friend coming over to play cards got the chair with their back shoved into that stale piny mess would probably never have come back.

So of course, I was planning on using the entire week to clean the place gradually, nude the tree of its red finery, and etc. Funny how times gets away from a person. In this statement, read: Friday night, home from work at 12:30am knowing the place had to be clean by 8am. It's awfully handy that, while my motto is "you only get one chance to make a first impression", following that, it becomes "after that it doesn't matter, they got their shot to see it looking good."

I realized I had neglected to alert my flatmate of the impending arrival. Anyone who has flatmates knows this is a no-no. So I told her. Only to learn that she also had a surprise guest. Who would be arriving in 3 hours. As I looked at my sad little Christmas tree I had fondly named "Dougie", I remembered my mother's words. "That thing is a fire trap" Me: "But it's still green! And we've BONDed!"

Looking at it now, I can see that it isn't green...it is more of a "dead turtle" color, and the only reason I was attached to it was because the needles were everywhere--sticking in my socks, getting in my shoes.

I had to use a candy cane to coax the ornaments out of the tree, as the needles actually pierced flesh. Then I did something I hadn't known that I wanted to do until then. I took the red hair spray my little sis gave me for Christmas and spray painted a giant red happy face on Dougie. I filled in the other area's with a glow-in-the-dark black light paint that was the other half of her gift. All this was of course done to the strains of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" that I blasted to delight the apartment complex. (hey, from the sounds of the parties I was hearing an hour previous...nobody was going to hear anything anyways)


But then how to dispose of it? I considered sneaking it out to the street side, which is a kind of foliage waste area that gets swept regularly...then I looked at the plastic bucket on the bottom. And at all the "potentially fatal if swallowed" chemicals I had just sprayed all over him, and realized that he was a tree cyborg. Half tree...half...something else. So I propped Dougie up in the dumpster with his happy face ready to greet the next lucky disposer.

Looking at his happy face made me almost as happy as vacuuming our entire apartment at 3:15 that morning. And it looks good. :)