Forgotten Sleep

No, we didn’t go Christmas shopping today, but I did think back to my college days while rocking Little Man tonight. It all started with thinking about carving pumpkins this weekend with Big Girl and Little Man, and that make me think of doing the same thing with my college roommates our sophomore year. Then, I heard Loving Husband reading “The Night Before Christmas” to Big Girl as a bedtime story. Immediately, my memory was launched back to that same year in college when we all decided that our log cabin (yes, we lived in a log cabin by a lake in college — try not to be too jealous) needed a Christmas tree. Let’s take a walk down memory lane, shall we?

That year, there were six of us living in that log cabin by the lake. For the most part, we got along, despite a few spectacular arguments along the way. But the holidays were near, and we all decided to go in on a Christmas tree and decorations. One Friday after class, we all piled into my Jeep Cherokee Laredo and went to Lowe’s or Walmart, I honestly can’t remember. The point is — we bought a tree.

We worked together to tied the tree to the top of the Jeep, making sure that it was secure and not going to fly away. On the way back to the cabin, we talked about how to decorate our tree, what to put where, etc. About halfway back to campus, we realized that people in other cars were staring rather intently at us with these very strange looks on their faces. We chalked it up to thinking that they were surprised that a group of girls would go out and buy a Christmas tree. But, the closer we got to campus, we realized that people weren’t only looking, they’re were laughing — pretty hard. Honestly, we couldn’t figure out why — it was just a Christmas tree for Pete’s sake!

The reason for the laughter, though, was immediately clear when we got out of the car. Half of the tree’s branches were standing completely straight up in the air, some of them were actually bent backwards. They looked at bit like a dislocated shoulder or something…rather grotesque, actually.

We couldn’t help it — we all busted out laughter at our own stupidity! In our excitement to get a Christmas tree back to our cabin and decorate it, we had paid absolutely no attention to how we loaded it on the car. Whoops!

Then, we realized that the freaky-bent limbs weren’t our only problem. We had neglected to ask the nice guy carrying the trees out to the cars to level off the bottom of the tree. There was no way the tree would stand up, and leaning it up against the wall just looked ridiculous. We just couldn’t do it.

Of course, we didn’t have an axe, so we had to improvise. A few of us fumbled in our drawers, the only thing we could dig up was — wait for it — a butter knife. Yes, we set about evening out the bottom of the 6” diameter tree trunk with the knife we used to spread our Country Crock in the morning. We each took a turn, stabbing, sawing, hacking at the tree. After a while, the blade actually got hot. Finally, we took a break. For all our effort, the sweat, the profanity and the near blood-letting, we had succeeded in digging a three-inch long, half-inch deep gash in our already-deformed tree.

I think we kept at it for a little while longer, but we finally gave up. We sat around in a semi-circle, staring at this piece of forest that we’d brought into our cabin, wondering how on earth we were going to get any use out of it. One of us had the brilliant idea of leveling it out but shoving paper or tissues or something on the shorter side. Sounds ridiculous, I know, but it worked well enough for us to keep the tree vertical for the week and a half before exams were over.

Now, if I could only remember how we got it out of the house…