Deja Vu
No, you're not seeing things. Nor are you imagining that you remember this already. This is how my Christmas tree currently looks.
But M, you ponder.
I've already seen the photos of your tree all decorated and pretty. What do you mean this is how your tree looks?Well, it all started with a very loud sound.
CRASH!. And it only got worse from there.
Let's rewind a smidge. I put up my tree and decorated it last week. It was lovely and perfect. I was enjoying it greatly. Today, I finally had some time in the day to work on my holiday cookies. So I was working on my
Tea Biscuit recipe and talking to my mom about the problems I was having with flour-to-butter ratio. (I need to change it because I think 2 cups flour and 2 sticks butter work better than 2 1/2 cups flour.) ANYWAY, after speaking with my mom, while my cookies are in the oven, I'm on the phone with my friend Rand discussing presents and the still unfinished shopping when I hear the worst noise ever.
My tree had crashed completely on it's side to the ground. Broken glass everywhere. Water soaking the carpet. Ornaments both broken and intact strewn across the living room. I broke down sobbing. I tried to pick the tree up and couldn't do it. It weighs about as much as I do and all I could manage was to get it propped against the wall. Hysterical, I asked my friend Rand if he could come over and help me get it standing. He was at work, but his work is a mere 3-minute drive away. Love on the other hand is an hour away. Dear friend that he is, he came right over and spent the next hour with me picking up glass, collecting the unbroken ornaments and trying (unsuccessfully) to reset the tree. Turns out the stand broke. Whether it broke and that's what caused the crash, or Gracie knocked it over and it broke because of the crash, I can't say. I know it wasn't Mika because she was on the couch sleeping when it happened. I have a hard time believing that it fell just randomly out of nowhere on it's own. But I don't know for sure either way.
What I do know is that I lost about a dozen ornaments. Some were just generic balls, one was part of a Mickey set of 12 we got last year and about five or six were heartbreaking. You see, I have ornaments on my tree that are over 60 years old. I'm the third generation to have them on my tree. They were on my mother's before me and my mother's mother before her. They are utterly priceless to me and utterly irreplaceable. It breaks my heart that I lost so many of them. I've never broken any in all the years since she gave them to me and now - poof - in an instant, five or six (it's hard to tell; a couple ornaments shattered into tiny, unidentifiable pieces) are just gone forever.
Rand went back to work for the last 45 minutes or so of his day. Love stopped and bought a new tree stand on the way home. Rand came by after work and helped Love and I get the tree set up in the new stand. I had to take everything off - including the lights - because everything had fallen and dragged and shifted from the fall. Some of the branches even got bent and broken. We ended up rotating the tree slightly from where it was facing before to try to offset the broken/tattered branches.
So now here I am, with a tree that I have to re-light and re-decorate. While it's fun the
first time, it's really not the second. I'm still so shaken from the whole experience. I've never had a tree collapse before. The image of all those broken ornaments all over the carpet.... It's heartbreaking. I cried so much this afternoon. (In fact, the crying and the stress have left me with a terrible headache.)
Love and I were going to do some gift shopping tonight, but we're going to do the tree instead. It's just frustrating and depressing to have to start all over. Especially when it's because of a situation as sad as this one.
And that's my day. I thought yesterday was a bleak rain cloud, but gee, it apparently got worse today.
~ snow falls on
:: miss m ::
at 12/19/2006 08:06:00 PM ~
~
