Oh, Christmas Tree . . .!

Despite what The Boy might say, we didn’t actually steal the Christmas tree.

Last weekend, Saturday December 15th to be exact, Jason and I went to two different Christmas tree lots in an ultimately failed attempt to obtain a Festive Holiday Tree. It’s not that they didn’t have trees I wanted, or that the trees were too pricey, it’s that there were no trees. None. Zero. Negatory on the trees.

At that point, I should have continued slaloming around the greater NoCo area and obtained a freaking tree. However, it was snowing and I wanted to get home and commence the Christmas Cookiepalooza I had planned.

This is me, though, and nothing can ever be simple. I didn’t go out on Sunday to get a tree. And Monday I had to work late, and The Boy was Christmas shopping and I wanted to go with him. Tuesday I didn’t feel good, and didn’t want to go out in the cold. This brings us to Wednesday, December 19th.

Now, I get that the 19th is, as The Liquor Fairy insists, a wee bit late in the season to go out shopping for Festive Holiday Trees. However, I assert that that’s just fucking stupid. People regularly used to put their trees up on Christmas Eve, and if capitalism was working as it should, there would be sufficient trees to meet the demand right up until Christmas. This is yet another failure I will lay at the feet of 7 years of a semi-literate Republican president and our ineffectual Congress, but I digress.

The first lot I went to did have trees, but they were a bit too mangy even for my taste. I understand that, when shopping less than a week before Christmas, some arboreal aesthetic compromises might have to be made. I do not hate on the little ugly trees, I just don’t care to put one up in my home. Plus, I don’t do long needles, which rules out at least half of the trees on any given lot from the word go.

We went then to the second lot, where in 2005 I got my tree like, three days before the damn holiday. Whatever. No trees. Not one.

By this point, I was threatening to start banging my upper body and head repeatedly back against my car seat like an emotionally disturbed child, a threat singularly terrifying to The Boy because he knows that I’m likely to actually do it. However, continuing up the road, we come to the Florissant Jaycee’s Tree Lot. As we get close I can see from the tree that they have veritable shit ton of trees, so I get to feeling pretty sassy.

Then we pull up and there is no one there. Empty trailer. Wet trees lit only by the sickly glow of the sign of the nearby Kmart. The hours on the trailer said that they should be open, but they weren’t.

I suggest we get out and look around. The Boy, anxious not to see his girlfriend have yet another meltdown, agrees, thinking that perhaps we can find a tree and return for it later.

“Fuck this,” I say. “If we find something, I’ll slide a check through the window.”

Nervous laughter.

“You think I’m kidding?”

“No. No, I really don’t.”

Which is why I love the man.

They did have a tree, full with short needles. It smelled of pine, and did not rain a shower of needles when shaken. It was, in short, good e-fucking-nough. “Let me get my checkbook,” I said, turning back to the car.

The Boy proceeds to follow with the tree. “No! We have to put it through the thingie!” I said, pointing the Tree Binding Plastic Netting.

The best part of this story, I think, is not the “buying” of a tree from an unattended dark tree lot, but the fact that we couldn’t get the tree through the damn tree netting thing.

First, he tries to shove it in wrong end first, which I think explains a lot about our sex life. Then, he refuses to apply sufficient force for the job at hand. Then we manage to stuff it through--directly through—leaving the tree unencumbered by netting, which is kind of the point.

I am almost no help because I am laughing hysterically the entire time. Finally, we get the tree bound up, and then we hacked through the plastic net with my keys since neither of us had anything better. Finally, I stuck the check through the mail slot, along with a note written on the tree’s tag telling what I had done and advising the Jaycees contact me at the number on the check in case there was some kind of issue.

I figure I won’t hear from them. They were probably at the bar.