O' Christmas Tree

My wife and I went up into the mountains today (well, now, yesterday) in search of a Christmas tree. The whole ride back I was formulating a blog posting about my disdain for popular culture's excuse for Christmas music. I've decided that post will be for another time... but definitely in the next few days.

Right now, that tree is what's on my mind - and not for any good reason, either.

I'll start this off by saying that I should have learned my lesson last year.

The first Christmas my wife and I were together we started a tradition of having a real Christmas tree in the house. We had both grown up with artificial trees, for whatever reason neither of us are certain. So picking out a Christmas tree for us has become a tradition that we look forward to each year.

Up until last year, we would go to the same Christmas tree vendor - a friend of ours from my wife's home church who has his own Christmas tree business. He would always help us pick out a great tree (although one year we got one that thought it was Spring again and started dripping sap all over the presents), recut it, drill it, bale it, and load it on our car.

But last year we went to a "choose and cut" Christmas tree farm in Maggie Valley, NC, picked one out, had it cut, they did the drill, bale and load routine, and we brought it home. Then I found out not only was the bore crooked, but the cut was also.

So I borrowed a friend's drill bit because I didn't have size that I needed, broke out my excuse for a handsaw, and went to work fixing the tree. A hour later, there it stood, in its stand, ready to be decorated.

This year, we went to a different tree farm - figured we'd try a different place. And this one definitely was different.

They had Santa in a little cabin, a lake with fish and ducks, a store, a wreath making department, a (small) fire for roasting marshmallows, a few wooden elves and snowman for children to stick their heads through and get their pictures taken with, about 3 or 4 times as many trees to choose from, a hayride... and about two or three hundred families each with at least two or three kids.

Understandably, I can imagine that all of that compounded on top of the holiday craziness can stress out and distract the people that work there.

Well, we took our hayride to the top, picked out our tree, they tagged it, we rode back down, got some hot cocoa, roasted a couple marshmallows and went to go get our tree and head back home.

They didn't have our tree. We waited - for 45 minutes. They hunted. They didn't have our tree.

Me and our first tree (the one they lost)

Now I can imagine what Clark Griswold would do in a situation like this and it probably wouldn't have been as nice or diplomatic as how I handled it; but I definitely was rather annoyed. I explained we had just driven nearly three hours, we both really liked the tree we had picked out and since they had lost it, we'd like to pick out another. So with what little light was left, we went back up the mountain, found another one, loaded it, and headed home.

Three hours later, I'm hunting down the trusty handsaw and wishing I had that drill bit back. I've been working with one not quite the size I need and it's just not doing the job.

Had I not asked for a discount because of the fact they had lost our first tree, I would have been really, really mad to have paid the full amount only to find out that the cut and the bore in this tree are so crooked you would have thought the Christmas tree farm was run by a bunch of Democratic congressmen.

Needless to say, there's been a lot of unChristmaslike language targeted at the tree in the last two hours. I've got about an inch of the tree mount pin in the tree so it's a balancing act right now.

There's about at least a vaccuum bag's full of needles on the carpet. And I don't know how much sap I just washed off my hands into the sink.

Home Depot is going to be seeing me in the morning. For some lucky drill bit and power saw, they're going to see a new home in the morning. And that tree is going to see the business end of both.

Sidenote: If you've never been to Black Mountain, NC, you need to stop at Berliner Kindl. It's a German restaurant and deli - and they have the best sauer kraut and German potato salad I have ever had.