O Christmas Tree

This is the story of the Springthorpe Christmas Tree 2008 edition.

I pretty much always put up the tree the weekend after my brother's birthday. (Doan family tradition). This year that happened last weekend. Now, we didn't put up the tree last year. We knew we'd be away for Christmas and with Jeremy scooting around, what was the point? So I went to put up this year's tree. (We use a fake one, remember that otherwise this story doesn't really make any sense). I carried it up from the storage room only to realise that I only had the bottom half of the tree (about 4 feet of tree). I looked back down in the storage area where I was kept, all I could find was some tree like garland, but no tree top. I kept looking around the storage room (I found the winter boots I'd been missing for Jeremy, but still no treetop). I asked Jonathan (the organiser of the storage room. He told me it must be there somewhere and suggested that perhaps I wasn't really looking hard enough. I looked again. I checked every box and nook and cranny in every inch of that storage room and nothing. Now it was Jonathan's turn. Of course he'd find it, I'm just blind and not really looking right? - wrong! He couldn't find it either. Well, can't we just put it up the way it is and fix it somehow? (that was his suggestion) No. I was really irritated now. Somehow my treetop had been probably thrown away during the past 2 years and now I have no tree. I decided to out. Hopefully to bring back a new tree.
If you know me well, you will know the absolute level of my irritation and despiration when you know where I went...Canadian Tire. I am not and have never been a fan of Canadian Tire. I don't like it. Any one of them, anywhere. It's a terrible, irritating store. It's over-crowded, not well laid out, and has silly Canadian Tire money that just piles up taking up valuable room in your wallet. It also has the irritating ability to carry just about anything that you can only find there and no where else. Of course being the Christmas season and a Saturday the parking lot it is full. Great. I put Jeremy into a shopping cart and headed inside. My first irritation at the store happens almost immediately. The wheelchair/stroller/shopping cart access has a locked lock on it and the seeming only other way you can get in is through the turnstyles...aha, wait, I can sneak through the returns area. As I head down I encounter irritation #2, pushing the shopping cart to the seasonal area is near impossible as the main aisle is narrow and is also taken up by people lined up at the cash registers (they were not thinking clearly when they designed this store). I finally make it to the Seasonal Aisle where the load of Christmas crap is unbelievable. They have this life-size singing Santa that is seriously the ugliest thing I have ever seen. Who would invent and be able to sell this stuff? The price of Christmas trees shock me. There is no way I'm paying hundreds of dollars for something that will be up in my house for 3 weeks of the year every other year. Then I spot it. In the sale bin is a stack of 3 ft trees marked down from $24 to $8.99. I take a closer look. Yes, the pole seems to be the size I need. I take it and go...back down the small main aisle to the narrow cash register lines where everything is at easy access for my one year old (a new Canadian Tire irritation). When my mini-tree is rung in and my Canadian Tire money is taken off the total, I owe $8.60. Perfect and irritating all at the same time. Why is it only at Canadian Tire I can find these things?
I take my mini-tree home, pull it out of the box, tug the bottom stand off and fit my mini-tree into the spot where my tree top was supposed to have gone. It fit. And you can't tell the difference. I used a little bit of moving tape for reinforcement and the job was done. Jonathan helped me get the tree standing in the tree stand (another crappy Christmas product that was a neccessary purchase that I could only find at Canadian Tire a few years ago). Elijah and I decorated the next day...(and you can't see the tape unless you are looking for it.) Really I'd had enough Christmas tree by the end of all of this. I'm enjoying the tree now, a week later, if only I could keep the one year old away from the ornaments, but I think that's a losing battle :o)