Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat…

…please put a million dollars in procrastamom’s hat!

She lives!

And also, who eats goose anymore? Turkey haters, that’s who. Not us though. We’ve got a no-thaw-hormone-enhanced-pre-stuffed-Butterball chillin in the freezer for T-day. Mmmm, hormones!

So, Richard decided that this year we were going to have our own tree in our own living room and just for fun, we would get a REAL TREE. Instead of going out and killing our own though, we ventured to IKEA for a pre-murdered one.

 

What do you think?  Guess how much it cost us.  Go on guess.   EEEEEEENNN, times up.  20 bucks!  And we got 20 bucks off our next purchase of $75.00 after Christmas.  We shop there for everything except groceries anyways, so we’ll end up with a free tree.  It’s Swedish for common sense.

Free trees do come with strings attached though and I don’t mean the white twine they used to wrap the branches.  I mean the needles.

NEEDLES!

Soilent Green is needles !  It’s needles !

Consider the costs incurred by this unnamed family recently.  Identities have been obscured to protect their privacy:

One $220 Bissel brand vacuum bought in September 06. Now clogged beyond reason and sucking nothing. Repairs estimated at triple the original purchase price – $660.00

One Swiffer brand Carpet Flick, thought by the wife to be the answer to all their prayers, but really, it doesn’t flick much and the four sticky refills that came with it were used up in mere seconds and why oh why didn’t she buy some refills because there are still approximately 4 gazillion more needles to flick – $15.99

One shop vac, complete with thick layer of dust, the oldest of which dates back to the fall of the Romans. Needles sucked up one by one by one by one. 3.9999987 gazillion more to go. Borrowed from Dad’s machine shop – Free

One carpet cleaner, to be rented after Christmas to remove Roman dust & filth from carpets. Carpets just recently cleaned, like 10 days ago recent – $60.00/day at Home Depot + cleaning agent

What? You were waiting for the “Priceless” part? Sorry, my Mastercard’s maxed and my Bissel is injured. There’s no priceless here. Total cost of tree = $735.99. And that was before we considered the fact that, because we hadn’t put our own tree up for seven years, we had no working lights and the decorations were tucked up in the outer recesses of hell…our storage room under the stairs.

Yeah.

There are boxes of stuff in there that I clearly do not remember owning.  Like why do I have more decorative tins than socks?  Will it ever rain so badly that we’ll need 130 tarps to keep ourselves dry?  Is the colour “country blue” still fashionable for kitchens like it was in 1991?

Good news though.  I found this:

It’s the angel that I made with my MIL one Christmas when Ashley was about five.  It’s one of the best things I’ve ever made…and it’s been hidden for seven years, so she had the honour of being the first thing I put on the tree after the lights.  My nephew Declan, who’s five and OBSESSED with lights and extension cords, was disgusted that my angel didn’t light up and he let me know it on Sunday by falling to the floor in a crumpled mess of tears because, “it’s just made of stupid wood!  And it doesn’t light up, waaaaah!”  Actually, it’s just made of stupid wicker and lace and Auntie Vicky likes it just the way it is.  So there.

———————

So, one of my New Year’s resolutions is, obviously, to clean out that damned storage room and find out what’s really in there.

…Richard’s resolution is to buy a fake tree next year.

NEEDLES!