My Redneck Christmas

Since it's now the 10th of January, it's about time I go ahead and tell you all about my redneck Christmas in Oklahoma. The day after Thanksgiving the kids and I pulled out all the Christmas decorations, and proceeded to put up the Christmas tree. Fortunately for Ben, he was working and not involved with this fiasco. Unfortunately for us, the stand for our fake tree broke when we were putting it up. It's 8 years old, so it's lived a good life, but this was NOT what I needed to deal with. But the kids and I were determined to get the tree up, and since Ben had the car at work I decided there was nothing else to do but to try to duct tape the tree stand together. The problem was I didn't have any duct tape. But I had packing tape! So I taped the stand together like so:


That brought us to problem #2. The stand was staying together, but one side sat much lower than the other two, and the tree kept tilting over. So being the eternal problem-solver I pulled out my 8-lb weights and placed them on the other two legs so the tree wouldn't tilt - like so:

And finally, we had a tree! It was crooked, but it was up. And once I covered the base with my tree skirt, it wasn't so bad...


One non-redneck thing that we wanted to post was the kids modeling the hats that Aunt Kristi knitted for them. Awesome work, Aunt Kristi!

Connor blinked.

The other redneck thing we had going on was this hilarity that ensued during one particular day the week after Christmas. The apartment complex across the street had a dead tree that needed to come down, so they apparently decided to get the maintenance guy and a couple of his buddies to do it. How hard could it be, right? When I got home from the store one afternoon, they had been working on it for a while. Thinking it would be just a few more minutes, I called my kids and mom and went out on the front stoop to watch them work so they could watch the tree come down. After another 30 minutes, I realized this would take some time, so I did what any good blogger would do - I grabbed my camera. Here's a video of them working. It's a little long - a minute and a half - but it's a good sample of what we saw: 3 shmucks who didn't really know what they were doing trying to cut down a tree. Near the end of the video they turn around and say, "We're not professionals!" That's obvious. At some point later on the big wedge that they put into the tree got stuck and the chainsaw wouldn't start. We began to wonder if it would ever come down...



But after hours of hard work, it finally did... to the cheers of many in the neighborhood.