The Second Most Ghetto Christmas Tree Ever

The very most ghetto tree ever? Christmas 2001. It was way before kids and we had only a month before bought our house in the Philadelphia suburb of Lansdowne, PA. That September I had been laid off from my HR job with an airline and Keith was in his second year of med school. I'm sure we were broke and I'm fairly certain that was the first Christmas that I didn't get to be with family. We were just not feeling a lot of Christmas spirit because we had decided not to bother getting a tree that year. Sad, no?

Well, my dear friend Michelle (love ya M!) would have none of that Grinch-ness. She was determined that we would have a tree in our new house. She worked magic only like Michelle can do and--sure enough--found us a tree! We resisted but a day or two later, we found a big tattered box with green plastic "branches" sticking out from various holes. This tree was donated to us by our bishop's wife--and I'm sure we saved it from a Christmas at the garbage dump as she had recently upgraded her own tree and this was her castoff. Which probably means that this particular tree had been saved from more than one garbage dump encounter--considering half of the things anyone (including the bishop's wife) owned in Lansdowne, PA had been pulled off from someones curb waiting for a bulk trash pickup.

This, I must say, was the first FAKE tree in my life. I'm a tree snob when it comes to Christmas. I want the real smell, the needles all over the floor, the bonfire afterwards, etc. So when this tree arrived on my doorstep, I was totally offended by it's "fakeness". But we reluctantly set it up in our empty dining room. Michelle came over later with a bag of Christmas lights--another save from the garbage dump on our part. There were probably 6 or 7 strings of lights--a total of maybe 500 bulbs. I'm pretty sure only about 100 actually worked. This tree started out ghetto and was going downhill fast. We took out the tangled mass of lights and stuck them on the tree in the same tangled mass. We tried to stretch them around a bit for full coverage but it was mostly just a garland of electrical cords and burned out lights. Later I popped a bag of microwave popcorn and found a needle and thread to add to the ghetto-ness. After I munched on some of the popcorn, I ended up with about a 3 foot section of strung popcorn. That ended up as our only decoration draped on the pathetic tree. It was absolutely a Christmas tree tragedy. In the end, we spent Christmas morning at Michelle's anyway so the plastic tree-shaped-object never hosted our Christmas joy.

That was one pathetic, super ghetto tree. We threw it out to the curb as soon as possible. Maybe even Christmas night? It really was begging for the garbage dump (although, I wouldn't be surprised if someone else "discovered" it from our trash pile).

Fast forward a decade or so. We have had so many fantastic Christmas trees over the years. Some bought from grocery store parking lots, others hacked down with a saw in the forest. I'm no Grinch--Christmas is absolutely a magical time and I haul out our Christmas decorations the day after Thanksgiving every year and deck the halls with as many lights, ribbons and bells as I can manage.

But this year.....oh gosh, where do I start?

It's a long story and most of it can be blamed on our house in Kentucky that hasn't sold. The short version is that we have found ourselves living in a 2-bedroom townhouse, hoping, expecting, praying that our house will sell. We moved here in August thinking we would tough it out for a month or two MAX but it's clean and we didn't have to sign a long-term lease (because, you know, "as soon as the house sells"..........).

Five months later, here we are. All three kids share one bedroom and SO MANY of our things are deep, deep, deep down in our garage, never to be seen again until we move. Of course, when we moved here, Christmas seemed like a lifetime away so all the decorations were stored as far back as possible. Which, it turns out, means no Christmas decorations for us this year.

But I would not, could not be without a tree! We paid our $10 for a permit to find one in the forest. We hauled all the kids into the mountains and went in search of the best Charlie Brown sized Christmas tree we could find. Seriously, I was thinking maybe a table top tree would be all we could squeeze into our front room. We looked around for a while and found one that seemed ok (for a Charlie Brown tree, that is). Keith was just about to start sawing when at his feet he noticed a tree, already cut, laying on the ground. He picked it up and we all decided, what the heck? Let's save ourselves the trouble and just take it. (Notice a pattern here? Taking people's castoffs for Christmas trees never ends well for us.)

We tied the poor thing to our car and brought it home. Of course, we couldn't find our fancy Christmas tree stand to save our lives so Keith had to prop it upright with some nails and a couple scraps of wood. There's no way that poor thing will ever see a drop of water again. We brought the tree inside and scooted a couple of things aside to make room for it. It is literally squeezed next to the couch and it's choking out our beloved house plant (which, I'm just sayin, has been alive and well for 12 years!! TWELVE!!! Green. Thumb.).

Of course the dozen or so strings of lights we own will never see the light of this Christmas so I had to run to Target for help. I bought a measly two strings of lights--just so my kids would have enough to stoke their little imaginations. Then I told my kids to go nuts and decorate it however they wanted. We ended up with a couple of paper stars and a couple of little drawings that we put on strings and hung, plus a little box of bells that we ended up with at an ornament exchange recently. That's it. So. Pathetic.





Despite our ghetto tree, Santa is planning a nice stop at our house. Although, since we don't have a chimney, it's been determined that the fat man will be using our dryer vent.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!