the tree

as my sister and father were spending Christmas with me (yeah!!!), i had to get a tree. originally, i was adamant i wanted a real one and had seriously looked into renting one (they then replant it for the following year - you can have the tree 3 years in a row) but as they don't deliver across the border, it was getting really complicated. but i was really unhappy about getting a real tree that had been chopped off as it seems like a complete waste of perfectly good tree (the lungs of the earth after all!), especially for a mere 2 weeks of it being up. and again, the logistics were not made easy by my having quite a small car. 

while all these thoughts were spinning in my head, i went to get some tree decorations. and thought they had some really nice trees. and only realised later on that they were fake. really good fakes. i mean, until then, all the fake trees i'd seen looked terrible. most of them didn't look anything like a tree, other than the general shape. but these ones had needles and all, like the real ones. and it came in a box that fit in my car. perfect. 

the only thing missing was the smell. after all, that's half the fun of a Christmas tree. so i went to the flower shop and got some fresh pine tree branches, which i covered the unnatural looking 'feet' with. worked like a charm.

when my sister and father arrived, i couldn't wait to see how long it would take them to figure out the tree wasn't real. my sister couldn't quite see the point of this one part of the tree but didn't actually work it out until i told her. ditto my father who was even slower on the uptake. despite seeing a part of the branches that is completely unnatural (near the trunk), you could see he was shocked when i told him. 

mission accomplished!