My family

Family Stories Vlog

TRIMMING THE TREE

15 Dec 2016

Saturday is my day to watch The Food Network and last Saturday Ree Drummond (The Pioneer Woman) made stuff with puff pastry.  I missed most of it, but caught the sausage palmiers, which looked delicious.  I bought puff pastry and sausage and decided to make it this morning.  As you can see I lack the finer points of Drummond's recipe:

However, despite how they looked, they were really pretty tasty, so tasty that that when the Blue Apron box arrived with frozen meat, I decided to finish the palmiers for dinner.

'Tis the season to be out with all the stress of shopping for Christmas "stuff," which I have not done, preferring to do my shopping on line.  But I finally realized that Bri and Lacie might be here briefly the day after Christmas and I should have some semblance of Christmas around here.  We have not put up a tree in several years because we haven't had 'Christmas' in this house in a long time.  We have a semblance of a tree made of golden balls that I put up on our dining room table, but that's it.

But this year I wanted something that resembled a real tree and was willing to go fake to get it.  I had heard that I could find a nice tree at Michael's.  I dutifully downloaded the coupons they sent me yesterday.  And I noticed in print so tiny I could barely read it, that the 20, 40 or 50% discounts did not apply to Christmas trees over 4' tall.

It actually was irrelevant anyway since they only had three trees, which we highly decorated and quite nice, but even if they qualified for the 50% discount, the original price was $159.  I wasn't going to do that for an hour or so with the girls!

But I did find a Charlie Brown-type tree that was only $8.  It was scruffy, wire, scrunched up, but the price was right--and it was green.  Of course it wasn't one of those that came with lights, so I bought a string of 35 tiny lights and a teeny golden garland and headed home.

While we were watching Jeopardy, I trimmed the tree.  First I had to fold all the branches out and bend them to look as normal as possible.

Then I had to wind the 35 light around the tree...about twice as many as the tree should hold, but there was no way to use fewer.

Finally, I draped the golden garland over the branches.  When I plugged it in, to my surprise it didn't look horrible.

It's just about the same height as my mixer and we can put it on a little table in the living room when/if the girls stop by here.

I picked up some other things at Michael's but managed to get away under $50, I think, which is miraculous.  But my back was killing me.  Actually my neck has been giving me a hard time and I had been out of any pain meds, so I staggered into Target, next door to Michael's, and stocked up on Tylenol and took 2 as soon as I got in the car.

I stopped by Atria on the way home to bring my mother a little Christmas holly arrangement I had picked up for her ("is it Christmas?  I thought it was May") but sitting there answering her questions about whether we are going dancing or not, I kept nodding off, so I just picked up her laundry and came on home.  I staggered into the house, and plopped into the recliner and fell asleep instantly.  Good thing for me I don't have to really go Christmas shopping!