O Christmas Tree

NOW it feels like Christmas is on its way - it didn't when we put the lights up in the yard or draped the house with tinsel or made snowflake-shaped gingerbread. But now that the tree is up I can feel it. Christmas is close!

We piled in the car and met up with my parents at one of the local Christmas Tree farms (the best kind of farm, right?) and there was a lot of back-and-forth about the pros and cons of the different trees. This one had a very flat back, but isn't that perfect to put it closer to the wall? That one was nice and bushy but leaned too much to one side. It was barely a competition, though - this tree was going to be ours from the moment we saw it. It was love at first sight amongst the gum trees.

That's ours with the blue tag.

They had a pole marked with measurements so that you could get an idea of the size of the trees, but who needs one of those? It was clearly the perfect tree and none other could compare. We tied our tag to reserve the tree, paid for it, and headed home to wait for my brother and his trailer to collect and deliver it to us.

It was too big to go through the front door, and I had to move my car out of the carport to get it around the side. The sliding doors at the back are larger but we still had to bend the lower branches in to get it through, and I was cringing at the anticipated snap as we pushed our luck too far. We were in luck, though, and through the door it came! The chosen bucket seemed much smaller than it had before the tree arrived, and as we lifted the tree upright we observed the truth: our eight foot ceiling was brushed by the top of the apparently eight foot tree.

The notch at the top lets you tuck the end neatly in. So efficient!

After trimming off the offending branches and agreeing that we could put the star on the front just as well as on the top, it was time to decorate. I wouldn't say that I was short but once you've tried to wrap tinsel around an eight foot tall tree you have to admit your limitations. In the end it took a number of chairs - and a few stubbed toes as we climbed on and off of them - and a strategic repositioning of our apparently limited tinsel supply before we were satisfied. The biggest win of the night was the payoff from an investment I made last year - packing up the lights by wrapping them around a cardboard tube (seen above - I think this one was from some wrapping paper). There were zero tangles. Zero! Unravelling the lights was literally the easiest part of the whole process.

Christmas is great!

My icing skills leave a little something to be desired but it still tastes just as good, so...

In knitting news I have resumed my love-hate relationship with my Luggala sweater. I am up to the sleeve caps now - the end of the tv knitting, sadly, but approaching the beginning of the really interesting part (the lace!) - and it's my first time knitting these so I have absolutely no idea if the sizing is coming out right. I am struggling once again to figure out what my chicken scratch notes mean in terms of gauge and adjusted stitch and row counts. I promise I will never again take on a project like this one without leaving legible notes!

I guess that only time will tell if this is going well - once the whole thing is sewn up we will see whether or not it actually fits. And if not, well... if I have to start over, at least I'll have tv knitting again.