Leaning

We made some rookie mistakes when buying our Christmas tree this year. With such high ceilings, we wanted the biggest tree we could get – lesson #1: you don’t actually want a tree as tall as the ceiling. It doesn’t look right. We’d gone to Home Depot for some other things and looked at their trees, which only went up to 8 feet; we thought we could fit almost a 10-foot tree, so we went to a little lot near our house. We ended up with a very, very tall and very, very large tree and got the lot owners to agree to deliver it the following day. We also bought a stand that they said would work best for big trees, to keep it stable and straight.

Well…when they came and set it up, there were 5 kids inside, and 6 adults working on Jarom’s car outside, plus 2 adults inside. We made way for the tree and they put the stand on before standing the tree up. I excitedly swept up the fallen needles and snapped on the tree skirt I bought. (I saw it recently, bought it immediately with some of my spending money, and felt extra happy when it sold out the next day.) Only when I went to take a picture did I realize the tree was a little bit tilted.

By the time Jarom was done working on his car for the evening, the tree was looking distinctly crooked. He spent an hour trying to fix it, but sadly, his efforts were in vain. (To be fair – it is leaning much, much less than before, and it’s been turned around so it’s tilted in different directions now.)

Please forgive the mess! And please tell me your advice on fixing it! Jarom’s next attempt will be to cut off the base of the tree where the hole has been incorrectly drilled and redo the whole thing. It certainly won’t hurt for the tree to be a little shorter! I can’t wait to decorate. I have lots of plastic gold dinosaurs for ornaments, and I’ll add in some gold balls and LOTS of lights.