O Christmas tree

I have been looking for a new artificial Christmas tree for the past year and a half. The little tree I bought two years at AC Moore was too motley even for me after one use. Last year my mother gave us a white tree she had, but it had been left partially in sunlight and was yellowed too badly to use, so we ended up hanging the ornaments on the big tree. Which worked out well, because we needed a lot of ornaments to put on that ginormous tree.

So, this year, I decided to start my quest for a new tree early. My dream tree was very simple: green or white, unlit, 4 feet tall. Nothing trendy, has to make the hand-stitched ornaments look good, as well as the other ornaments I put on there--the ones for the animals. This wasn't asking the world, right? The in-laws gave me a nice check for my birthday, and I decided I'd use half of it for stitching-related stuff and the other half for responsible things. Well, I figured having a new tree to put my stitched ornaments on qualifies technically as stash, at least in Crazyville, so that was what I used some of my birthday money for. So, yesterday, I told Left-brain I was going out for a tree, and if I saw what I wanted, I wasn't coming home and discussing it, I was buying it. He knows that tone in my voice . . .
and just told me to be careful on my trek into the greater metropolitan Crazyminster area.

And I decided I wasn't buying the first thing I came onto either. So that meant going into three different stores that I figured might have trees in my price range. I'd already hit up Michaels on Friday, and there weren't any likely candidates there. Too expensive, and a lot of feather trees. I've had cats too long to buy a tree made of feathers.

Walmart was first--our Walmart is a bear to get into, so finding a parking place is half the battle. They had several possible candidates. 3 ft green tree, 3 foot lit white tree with colored lights, 6ft unlit white one and green one. A lot of choice, but I wasn't sure it was what I wanted. Besides, I was getting distracted by all the Christmas gift and food displays. Off to Target. I can restrain myself at Target. Particularly when they didn't have small trees and what they had was expensive. I wasn't trying to replace our big tree; we have a family ritual that we go cut our tree down and have a nice day out.

So I went off to Lowes, pretty sure I had found the tree at Walmart. Somewhere between Target and Lowes, I realized I wanted a white tree. I bought a bunch of teal and copper balls last year to decorate the little tree that didn't work, so why not just get the tree I envisioned last year? Well . . . Lowes had no unlit white trees. They had one with colored lights on it for $118, which was so out of my price range, LOL. Not that I couldn't have bought it, but I really didn't want colored lights on it. Lit trees are great--my mom has them--but what if I want to change the color? One year I might want red and green balls on the tree, and want lights to match that. So . . . while I was poking around Lowes, looking at their other decorations, I just decided that I'd get the Walmart tree.

I did pretty good. I bought the 6.5 foot tree. I looked at their tree toppers. None of them inspired me, so I looked at the ornaments, thinking if I just had a big snowflake I could wire it onto the tree. No go, but they did have something I realized I can hodge-podge together to make a fun and funky tree topper. I chose blue lights to go with my ornaments, and also as an homage to the tree my parents had when I was growing up, which used blue lights because my mom had had them growing up.

Left-brain is a bit confused, as I don't have that many hand-made ornaments. He said, "Where are we going to put this?" I gave him a look and said, "I have a lot of finishing to do. This gives room to make more ornaments." He gave up then . . . I knew I won when he said, "We're going to have that tree for a long time." He is excited, though; he even suggested we not cut down a tree this year. I think he was joking, but I told him we had to have the real tree too, LOL.