It's Never too Early for Christmas Tree Tips

Yes, it is October.  Christmas rapidly approaches.  Our boys have already informed us that they want, among other things, a trampoline (very bad idea) a Bugatti, a Langorbeenie and a machine that will take them to the 2nd Dimension like Phineas and Ferb. (Don't ask.)

So, to help everyone make preparations for the Holiday, below I have set forth my professional tips on how to pick, and erect, the perfect Christmas tree.  These guidelines come from personal experience, and all of them are based on true, emotionally scarring events.  Yes, even the chain saw in the living room.

 It has been a Lucido family tradition, possibly dating back to Jamestown, to pile in the family truckster with the kiddies (all hopped up on sugary treats, such as the delightful Hand Imprint Turkey Cookies with glopped-on hills and ridges of green, red and purple icing, all whooping, screeching and twitching like euphoric Meth addicts with uncontrollable pre-Christmas mania) the Saturday after Thanksgiving to go select a real, live Tannenbaum. Artificial, sapless trees are for infirm people in nursing homes. Or Grinchy wusses who over-value their sanity. (If you don't get an intense feeling of satisfaction when repeatedly clogging your 50 horsepower Shop Vac sucking up metric tons of dead pine needles off the carpet every two hours so your foraging, one and a half year old daughter won't eat them, you don't know the true meaning of Christmas, and I pity you.)


In years past, I have demonstrated a Clark Griswold-like inability to accurately gauge the size of our tree: standing in the great outdoors, picking out our "just right" Douglas Fir, I've underestimated the tree's actual living room "presence," despite diplomatic hints from tree farm employees who eyed our chosen tree and said things like: "Uh, you folks gonna put this up in a barn?" or "Mister, d'ya have a trailer? I think this might crush your roof." Inevitably, this poor understanding of spatial relationships produces generous amounts of Holiday Tree Rage, when Daddy is forced to use a hack saw, branch loppers, high-tensile, wall mounted bridge support cables and risk a simultaneous double hernia and brain embolism shoving Gigantor Pine thru the front door and winching it upright.

Of course, Daddy Never Learns, and, indeed, Grows Ever Dumber. Thus, you guessed it: this year's King Kong Tree caused so much stroke-inducing wrath and multiple, tool-flinging tantrums before the accursed thing was semi-vertical and decorated, that I had to share some helpful tips on how Christmas tree professionals -- like me -- Just Do It, and in the process make it look so easy. Note: Not all of these steps are mandatory, although most are recommended. Pick those that work best for you and your family.

1. Drive to tree farm that used to be close to your old house, but is now a good 45 minutes away -- because it's tradition and emitting CO2 annoys people who drive Priuses -- and pick out a tree. Note: if tree is higher than the tippy top line on the 10' board used for pricing, consider downsizing. (Important Bonus Tip: if your bone weary 5 year old son falls asleep en route to the tree farm, dare not wake him from his Nap of the Dead upon arrival and make him get into his hated winter coat and scratchy hat, for yea verily, you will unleash such a torrent of misery and unspeakable crabbiness that the foundations of the earth shall tremble and the heavens will cry out: Fools! Why didst thou wake the slumbering child and not bring pacifying candy or powerful sedatives?)

2. Arrive safely home with tree. If tree has not flown off on the interstate and impaled a trailing State Police trooper in the head a la "Final Destination 2," it was tied down properly. If the tree does achieve launch status during return trip (holding it firmly to the roof with your left arm like the gene pool depleters who transport unsecured mattresses on top of their mini-vans is not advisable), race to the next exit, turn off your lights, park in a neighbor's drive way for at least a half an hour until the police cruisers stop circling the development, and buy a less dangerous and more easily transported potted Kwanzaa shrub.

3. Remove tree from roof of SUV. Do this when it's already dark outside to lessen visibility, and without gloves, because chicks dig men with pine needle scars (okay, scratches) on their hands. Although the tree is the approximate size and weight of a canoe filled with bricks, do not ask for wife's assistance, as this betrays weakness. If you drop the tree because your foot slips off the running board, and the trunk leaves an ugly scratch on the side of your vehicle on the way down, muffle curses by screaming into your wife's squishy travel pillow.

4. Check to see if trunk of tree will fit into plastic sleeve for tree stand. Ha! Of course it doesn't fit, you idiot! It's the circumference of a smallish Red Wood. Get hammer and chisel -- seriously -- and begin methodically chipping off layers of bark while seated on butt numbingly cold garage floor. This should take only an hour. If your legs lose all feeling, smash the chisel into your knee cap. This will take your mind off the pain in your pulped thumb, which you mangled during an ill- advised, "I'll-make-this-$%&*@-wood-knot-that-is-sticking-out-wish-it-was-never-born!" Babe Ruth hammer swing.

5. With bottom of tree trunk shaved to half its original circumference, screw on plastic sleeve that will now insert neatly and securely into the "socket" portion of the very expensive tree stand you bought from Hammacher Schlemmer, which is guaranteed to hold the mightiest, steroidally enhanced Christmas tree in all of the North Pole.

6. Grunting with exertion, haul tree, battering ram style, thru front door and into living room. Blindly -- and unsuccessfully -- try to insert it into tree stand. When wife, watching your titanic struggle with nature, asks bemusedly if she can help, yell "No! I can do it myself!" just before tripping over toy truck, losing balance and staggering like a drunken lumberjack into T.V. armoire. Scream cathartically: "I hate this stupid tree! I wish Christmas never came!" as your children, seated in their pj's on the living room ottoman watching "Elmo Goes to Grouchland for the Seven Thousandth Time and If Daddy Hears Elmo's Blankie Song Again He'll Eat a Bullet," stare goggle eyed at Daddy the sweaty berserker and ask Mommy: "Why is Daddy mad and saying that bad word 'stupid?'"

7. With tree precariously inserted into the base, spend the next half hour trying to make it stand up straight. Do this by stepping on the pedal that allows the tree stand to swivel, while threatening to throw the tree out the window if it won't stop tilting to the left or right in blatant defiance of your wishes. When it becomes obvious that the tree is too tall and too heavy for even a sturdy, German-engineered "Best in Test" tree stand (this might have been obvious even before now to a keen observer), and that the heavy plastic base also used in the manufacture of Panzer tanks is making foreboding creaking noises, as if the entire contraption is about to grenade, give up and stomp off to bed. Comfort yourself that you have accomplished most of your impossible mission. So what if the tree is not perfectly straight. You can tell guests it's a leaning, post-modern tree, that does not bow to patriarchal conventions of straightness. At least there's no risk it will fall down.

8. Awaken at 3 am to the sound of the tree falling down and crashing like a sack of dead elephants into the living room couch. Walk out to living room and stare in silent, stupefied fury at fallen tree for a full five minutes, maybe ten, gazing at the blast radius of branches, pine needles and no doubt thousands of tiny sap projectiles now flecking the living room walls. Fantasize about feeding the evil tree into an industrial wood chipper, until the wife breaks your demented reverie and demands that you come back to bed.

9. Get up at seven a.m. Note bitterly that Santa has not magically fixed the tree while you slept. Its fallen carcass still lies dead on the living room floor, mocking you.

10. Time for drastic, anger-fueled measures. Still wearing boxers and undershirt, get wife's loppers from the garage. Gleefully hack off branches, until the bottom three feet of trunk is denuded.

11. Bust out the chain saw. After spending twenty minutes fixing the chain -- Gollum hates the dratted, always-coming-off chainsaw chain! We hates it! -- savagely pull start the Poulan tree amputator. Revel in the window rattling cacophony. Don't bother dragging the tree back out to the garage; too much work. No, have the wife take the kids into the master bed room, and go Christmas Chain Saw Massacre on that overgrown pine. The tree has now been shortened by three feet, and the living room reeks of gas. Breathe deeply of the manly, oil/fuel mixture, a festive smell which will linger in your home, despite the use of numerous Glade air freshener bombs, until late January. Even the Who's down in Whoville loved the smell of gas in the living room on a Holiday morning.

12. Patiently explain to your crying children, who are hacking and coughing from the acrid chain saw smoke and the scary noise, that Daddy is not mad, but that there was a Christmas Emergency so Daddy had to use the loud machine. Also, instruct the children that might makes right, and then give them as many cookies for breakfast as they can double fist into their pie holes.

13. Spend 50 minutes on hands and knees vacuuming up wood chips from every nook and cranny in the living room while your wife stands over you like a drill sergeant, slapping a wooden spoon into her palm. Note this as a possible down side to using a chain saw in the living room.

14. Re-insert humbled, smaller tree (now a dwarfish 9 feet) into tree stand while doing a victory dance and yelling "How ya like me now? Mr. Tree Amputee?! Yeah -- Sucka! Um, Isaac and Riley, Daddy is saying grown up things. Ask Mommy later what 'sucka' means. No, the boy in Sunday school who took your truck is not a Sucka. We can only use that word at Christmas, when the bad tree won't stand up straight and falls over. Just do your dinosaur puzzle."

15. Search for various tools that you threw across the living room last evening in justifiable anger -- where's the hack saw? -- and put them away. Explain to your children that throwing sharp tools is only ok when you're really, really upset and need to vent your frustration.

16. Put on the soothing Nat King Cole Christmas album, and munch contentedly on a man-sized mixing bowl of Honeycomb cereal, knowing that in this year's contest of Man vs. Christmas Tree, Tree won. But Man got his petty revenge, and it was sweet.