Come January, the real challenge isn’t sticking to your New
Year’s resolutions, paying the credit card bills, or going on a
diet. I say the real challenge is getting your artificial tree back
into its box.
Come January, the real challenge isn’t sticking to your New Year’s resolutions, paying the credit card bills, or going on a diet. I say the real challenge is getting your artificial tree back into its box. Yes, it’s true. We live in a society that can clone sheep, send a man to the moon, and make a mouse grow a human brain, but we can’t manage to get a 7-foot plastic tree back inside a 5-foot container.
If you think I’m exaggerating, just TRY it.
Take, for instance, our tree. Every year for the last five years, our artificial tree has outright refused to fit back into the box. No one knows why this happens. It could be because there’s a certain Top-Secret Tree Stuffing Process we haven’t been informed of. Or perhaps the box somehow shrunk. Or maybe, just maybe, we have an exceptionally claustrophobic tree.
However, my own secret personal theory is that artificial trees have a big master plan to take over the world. Once out of the box, the branches grow. First one. Then another. And another. And pretty soon, the tree is taking up the entire living room and expanding down the hallway to the kitchen where it finally fills up the rest of the house before moving on down the street.
Oh, OK. Of course, no one has ever really seen this happen. But then again most artificial Christmas trees are stopped long before they get that far. And it does explain why they never fit back inside the box. Coincidence? I think not.
All in all, when it comes to storing artificial trees, there are mostly two kinds of people. The stubborn and persistent type (a group I’ll call, “men”) who take putting away the tree as some sort of personal challenge. And then there are the more laissez faire type (a group I’ll call, “women”), whose approach is forgetting about the whole thing and going shoe shopping. And I don’t mean this as a stereotypical observation; this is purely based on personal experience.
Take, for instance, my husband. Every year he spends most of New Year’s Day squeezing all 25 bazillion pieces of our 10-foot tree back inside its 5-foot box, NO MATTER WHAT IT TAKES.
Picture this.
Husband: I’m going to put you away even faster than last year.
Tree: Ha! Ha!
Husband: I don’t care what you think; you’re going back inside your box.
Tree: Make me!
Husband: Hey, if you’re not careful I’m going to bend you in half, and jam your pre-lit lights underneath your bottom branches.
Tree: Go ahead Bub. TRY it!
Husband: HA! (Insert karate chopping actions here) TAKE THAT! AND THAT! AND THAT!
My friend Linda is clearly in the latter group of tree storers. She leaves a few branches out each year and stores them separately “somewhere” in the house. Naturally, by the time she’s ready to haul out the tree again she can’t remember where, exactly, “somewhere” is, so each year her tree gets shorter. And then there’s my friend Jan who tosses a garbage bag over the top and moves it out into the garage, where it’s either 1) run over by bikes or 2) used as a power tool rack or 3) taken out with the trash.
Oh yeah, there’s the third group of people that I didn’t mention (a group consisting of, well, me) who this year avoided the whole tree stuffing ordeal altogether by leaving the fake tree inside the box and buying a real one instead.
And, sure, some of you might call this “lazy.” However, I prefer to call it “efficient.”
WhatEVER. All I know is that it’s January, and my tree is safely inside its box. Granted, a small victory, but it’s a victory nonetheless.
