The Tree is DOWN!

Free at last!  Free at last!  Thank God, Almighty, I'm free at last!

Okay, that's a little dramatic but I am feeling that excited about regaining my living room with the Christmas tree gone.  I think that because we set up the tree early, we were all kind of "over it" right after Christmas ended.  The tree was starting to get dry and blah.  It wasn't smelling as pretty.  On top of all of that, it was taking up an entire huge corner of the living room.

I started the task of undressing the tree this morning before the kids got up.  I could potentially let the kids handle it but I'm incredibly anal retentive when it comes to organization and such and I just couldn't leave the job to someone who would carelessly sling the ornaments into a box.  I wanted them labeled, packed carefully and protected until next year's festivities.

My first freakout occurred when I realized that some of my "balls" were missing.  I had four complete packages when we put the tree up and suddenly, I was missing three ornaments.  No, that doesn't sound like a great big deal.  What IS a big deal is someone stepping on one that falls out of the tree as it's being carried outside.  If you've ever stepped on a piece of glass, it's painful.  If you've stepped on a Christmas tree ornament, it feels like a tiny knight is down there stabbing at your foot with his sword relentlessly, mistaking you for a flesh colored dragon.  No one seemed to know what happened to the ornaments and insisted that none of them had gotten broken.

My next freakout occurred when someone tried to sit in the midst of my organized chaos.  I had piles going and someone kept trying to sit in the middle of my piles and "help."  Now, again, this is not necessarily someone else's battle.  I am the one with the anal retentive tendencies.  Organization is a fun thing for me, believe it or not.  In fact, if I had the money to invest, my house would be far more organized than it currently is.  It'd probably look like the Container Store.  But I digress.....

The third freakout occurred when the tree did not seem to want to "let go" of the ornaments.  I'm somewhat convinced that the tree just knew what was going to happen to it.  It was clinging to the ornaments, screaming "Please don't let him chop me up!"  Okay, that's a bit dramatic.  The fact is that the tree was dying and the branches were enveloping the ornaments making it VERY hard to locate and rescue said ornaments from the tree of doom.

The fourth freakout occurred when I tried to remove the lights.  Man alive, if I thought that the ornaments were bad, I was about to lose it over the lights.  I was trying to carefully untangle the orange and blue lights from the tree and they were mangled around the masses of clingy dying tree branches.  As I fought to untangle them, my allergies were thrown for a loop and I went into an aggravating sneezing fit that about threw me over the edge.

Finally, I got the tree stripped down and it was time to go for the door.  Now, even though this tree was dying, that fat bastard did NOT want to fit out the door.  Again, I'm imagining this tree fighting for survival, freakishly strong as it battled to stay in its roomy corner.  As my fiancé got the tree out the door, I looked down at the thick blanket of needles on the floor and realized that I was either going to have to clean up the forest floor that was now my living room carpet or just let the squirrels and critters come in and live Snow White Style.  I moved all the furniture and vacuumed my way across the living room only to discover that it was time for a rearranging party.....and then spent the next forty five minutes trying variations on organizing my front room to best suit our décor.

I tell that tale to say that the tree IS, indeed, down and that the living room is MOSTLY assembled back together.  It's starting to look like a house again, which is both depressing and gratifying.  Here's to next year's festivities AND the clean up.