When I was a kid one of the funniest segments on Saturday Night Live was "Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy." Many were hysterical, but my family favorite has always been:
"One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to take my little nephew to DisneyLand, but instead I drove him to an old burned-out warehouse. "Oh, no," I said, "DisneyLand burned down." He cried and cried, but I think that deep down he thought it was a pretty good joke. I started to drive over to the real DisneyLand, but it was getting pretty late."
Occasionally events in life have caused this quote to come to mind. Saturday evening was one of those times. It was time to put up the Christmas tree. Gavin was super excited, because we had told him that this year we would put a big tree on the floor where he could see it, rather than the Gavin-proof mini tree we've put out of his reach in all his Christmases past. So we get out the box that contains our big tree and start assembling it, branch by branch. Gavin helped by fluffing up the branches. He was excited. And then we realized something got lost in our move last year:
Yup, the top portion of our tree is lost. What's odd is that I can remember cleaning out our attic in our old house before we moved, Jake asking me "what's this?," and me telling him it was the top of the Christmas tree. Somehow it just got thrown away. Or maybe its hidden in our attic somewhere and we'll find it when we move out of this house some day. Either way, we didn't have it for Gavin on Saturday. Epic Fail. So, we go online and find a great tree at Walmart that was easy to put together too, assembling in only 3 parts instead of having to insert every branch seperately. Jake went to go get it while I cleaned up the old tree. He got home, we opened the tree, and there were 154050493494848437478423874378 loose branches in the box to be assembled. It would have taken hours to assemble, every Christmas for the rest of our lives. Turns out we were wrong about the easy assembly part. We put it back in the box to return to the store. Epic Fail #2. It was at this point that I was glad I had been raised by a mom that always knew how to deal with situations like this. We got down the little 4 foot tabletrop tree, and I sat down next to Gavin to talk to him. I told him that he was going to have his own personal Christmas tree that he could decorate any way he wanted, emphasizing that this was going to be his tree. His eyes got real big, he inhaled deeply, and exclaimed "thank you Mommy!" while throwing his arms around me. After we assembled it (in 3 easy pieces, prelit!) Gavin looked up at it (it's about 6 inches taller than him) and said "hooge tee (huge tree)" Epic Win.
