The Great Christmas Tree Disaster of 2005

For the follow-up to this post, see this post: Down and Dirty Radio Segment (the Great Christmas Tree Disaster of 2005 (Take 2- the he said, she said version).

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I love the evening when the Christmas tree goes up.

Out comes the Boney M and Roberta Flack CDs.  My husband works on tree straightening and electronics (a.k.a. the one string of tree lights that never work).  Sophie (almost 4) clusters shiny balls on the bottom left quadrant of the tree.  I redistribute.  Isabelle (almost 7) dances around eating stale candy canes.  Tinsel gets mashed into the carpet.  Glass ornaments are shattered.

But perhaps my favourite Christmas tree memory hearkens back to December 2005.

I was eight-and-three-quarters months pregnant with Isabelle.  My husband had picked up an enormous Christmas tree from a nearby lot.  I mean enormous.   Like the one in the foyer of the Parliament buildings.  It was awesome and smelled divine.  To this day, I have no idea how he got the tree home or through the front door on his own.  Oh wait, I’m getting a flashback of him charging at the door with an almighty battle cry and pine needs flying everywhere.

We decorated the massive tree and went to bed feeling very festive, in our cozy little house with our Christmas baby on the way.

2005: baby on the way and the 12-foot tree

In the morning, however, we were greeted with this.

As we had slumbered, the massive tree fell.  We hadn’t heard a thing.  But pine needles, small branches, and ornaments were sprayed everywhere.   The tree took up the entire width of the living room.  Our coffee table still bares the scars of impact.

We stood, that morning, staring in disbelief.  Late for work, we eventually just left it.  When I got home that evening, my husband was already home.  He’d left work early – obsessed by the image of the disaster that awaited – and was at work on the restoration.  Eventually, the mammoth tree was re-erected.  Its base was drilled into the floor, and the top was stabilized with wires.  It would not defeat him.

The tree we put up last weekend isn’t so big.  Post-2005, we settled on a nice 8-footer as our standard.  Sure, it’s not the foyer of the Parliament buildings, but it does the trick nicely.

But just in case, it still gets drilled into the floor.