Feliz Naviblah

If you watch "My Name is Earl", you'll recognize the title of this post as a line from the Tuesday's show, but it quite accurately describes the Christmas spirit we are experiencing in the Alderman house.

First, let me just rant for a minute about a very disturbing show I watched on television the other night, "The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show". Nothing truly puts you in the spirit of the holidays like the giant dose of inadequacy and insecurity you experience after watching Brazillian supermodels waltz around a stage in their underpants. I saw somewhere that Heidi Klum did this show just six weeks after giving birth. I have been six weeks post-partum, and that is not what it looks like. My only conclusion is that Heidi Klum is an alien. The only model who looked even remotely like an average woman was Tyra Banks - you know, if the average woman was 9 feet tall. I still don't understand what this all had to do with Christmas, but I digress.

The issue that really has us feeling the Feliz Naviblahs around here is the Christmas tree. Anyone who has ever been over to our house at Christmas time has marveled at the size of the trees we hike out to Huber's and cut down, and you've probably heard me recount the stories of how Rob magically morphs into Clark Griswald when we get out to the tree farm. We were all excited and got all bundled up on Sunday and drove out to Indiana for our annual tree cutting extravaganza. We had built up all these images in our minds of carrying on this tradition with our kids and we just knew that this year Casey was going to have a blast helping us pick out and cut down the tree. Well, this year things went a bit differently...

So we get out to Huber's and it's like 12 below zero out there (much colder than expected) and so we freeze our rears off during the "hayride" out to the tree field. Then, the trees all appeared to have experienced "shrinkage" from the cold, because hardly any of them were over 5 feet tall. This is completely unacceptable for Clark - oh, I mean Rob. So we leave there empty handed and stop at another tree farm on the way home, but at this point Casey & I practically have frostbite and I refuse to get out of the car and continue the "hunt". Rob heads out into the farm on his own (big mistake) and calls fifteen minutes later proclaiming that the trees are amazing and he has found the perfect one. We haul it home, and he proceeds to whack 3 feet off the damn thing just to get it in the door. After much struggle, we get the monster in the stand and upright, and although it takes up a third of the living room, I have to admit that it is a beautifully shaped tree. We hang the lights and decorate it (which took me nearly two hours to do because the kind of tree he got had very soft needles and the ornaments kept sliding off). The Alderman's were ready for Christmas, right? Wrong. Yesterday morning I woke up to a note from Rob which read that he had found the tree laying on it's side when he came downstairs, and that he had it propped up against the wall and would get it back upright when he got home. I came downstairs, and there was water and pine needles all over the friggin' carpet. He comes home yesterday afternoon, and we spent 3 HOURS trying to get the tree to stand up straight. Finally, in an act of frustration and surrender, Rob heaved the tree over the deck rail and flung it into the backyard.

So now we are the proud owners of a very lovely artificial tree. I put it up and decorated it last night, and it certainly serves it's purpose, but I have to admit that I miss the giant tree that usually occupies that space. And I can tell that Rob is bummed out that his grand holiday tradition has been crushed, and he's really not very impressed with the new tree. We've decided that next year we'll still hike out to Huber's and cut down a much smaller tree and put it downstairs, so that way the tradition will remain intact, without the risk of one of us being crushed by falling timber in the living room.