Goodbye, Christmas Tree

I finally decided to put the tree away. It's been undecorated for about 3 weeks now, just waiting for me to stuff it in the basement. Normally we disassemble it, stuff it into boxes and stack them in the basement, but this year we decided to keep the lights on it and stuff it into the root cellar. I thought I could tackle this myself and attempted this yesterday when Sara was not home. Typically things like this go smoother when we're not yelling at each other. I have to admit that I could have used her help. The first problem that occurred was trying to stuff both my fat ass and the tree through the door to the basement. No easy task. Since I was already started and I'm a stubborn old mule there was no going back. Once I got the two of us popped thru the door and headed down the stairs, we ran into another snag. One of the strings of lights near the top of the tree looped itself around the hand railing.

Six feet away from me.

No way to reach it.

We're stuck in the stairwell.

I tried to push the tree back up the stairs in hopes the lights would un-loop themselves, but that was the equivalent of a dog shitting out a pine cone. It wasn't going to go that way without help. So I decided to climb up the stairs, stepping through the branches of the tree, and unloop the snagged lights. My first step resulted in my foot getting tangled in another string of lights. I couldn't get my foot out of the tree, and I couldn't reach the snag on the hand rail. The thought of just laying down on the tree and hoping for death crossed my mind. After some wiggling, the bottom half of the tree just fell off. My foot was free, but I had no idea where my slipper went. I got the lights unsnagged from the rail, retreated back down the stairs, retrieved my slipper from inside the tree, and put the dissected tree back together. I was within three feet of the root cellar when I set the tree down to open the door. The base on the tree snapped. The tree fell over. And, in a final moment of defiance, the tree broke into two pieces again.

It's still in a heap on the basement floor.