The Man and I have been together for 5.5 years now and yet
this is our first time Christmas-ing on our own. By ‘our own’, I mean we’re not
over at our families…his mainly in Mackay and mine in Malaysia.
This year, we
have decided to have a quiet one.
So I was excited to be organizing Christmas on my own this
year. However, it was not smooth sailing as I had expected it to be…
First, the tree.
We used to have a
Christmas tree…one we put up every year just for the sake of it. It was about
150cm, not too small but not too big. Adequate. What happened to it?
This happened to it.
Cleo is a Bullmastiff x Neapolitan Mastiff. When she came into our life, she lit it up like a bonfire on Guy Fawkes' night.
She also kinda
made it chaotic the first 6 months.
Everything was delicious to her, and I
meant EVERYTHING. I had to stop her from chewing the blinkers off my car one
day, would you believe that? It didn’t help that at 6 months old, she was
already weighing a toddler and so instead of the usual puppy destruction, we
had a puppy times ten magnitude of destruction. That picture there is Cleo at 3 months old.
Cleo ate our tree. No jokes.
I came home from work one day to find the garage looking
like Grinch’s torture room. Tinsels and ornaments were everywhere. Christmas
tree twigs strewn across the garage floor.
Cleo looked her best to act as if nothing was amiss, but it’s
not easy to do this particularly if you have glitter all over your fur, bits of
tinsels hanging from your jowls and the telltale sprigs of artificial pine
leaves all over you.
So this year, we had to buy a new tree. And by ‘we’, I mean ‘me’.
I had asked The Man what our Christmas decorating budget
should be. Now bear in mind that all these years we put up our tree, we have
been using ‘recycled’ stuffs from way before I was in the picture. Perhaps it
was his ex’s, or his old housemate’s…I’m not sure, but the bottomline is that this
is the first time we’re actually starting from scratch and spending money on
decorations.
Neither of us have any concept of how much this would cost.
So when he pulled a $50 figure out of thin air? I said “bring
it on!”
Being a frugal person combined with this challenge, I was
determined not to spend a fortune on a tree. I wanted something like our old
tree: not too big, not too small, just adequate. Surely, since everyone needs a
tree, the law of supply and demand will be on my side, no? There will be a huge
supply of Christmas trees to cater to a may-or-may-not be huge supply of
demand, and the surplus will result in cheap trees, yes?
That is how you always think when your degree is in
Business.
Anyway, I found a box of Christmas tree for $7. SWEEET!
Far from it being a warning sign to me, I thought I had
scored. The box said it was 90cm…which is great, no? I’m 149cm on a very good
day (lol), so a mere 50cm less than my height is good, right?
I’m thinking that 50cm the length of my face? Yeah? 50cm is
not THAT much. The box is small though….but even the 2 metres tree comes in a
small, although bulkier box. Ah, with the advance of packaging method nowadays,
you really cannot determine the size of something just from the box, can you? I
mean, look at IKEA flatpacked stuffs!
I might have to remind you again that both my degrees are in
Business and Finance. We don’t usually deal with lengths measurements.
When I proudly showed The Man the box, he remarked with that usual Aussie straight-faced-dry humour: "Did you returned to the Shire today to buy this Hobbit tree?", I still didn't get the clue. Well, I sorta did, but he towers over me so anything else is easily Hobbit-ish to him now, would it?
At least, that was how I saw it.
Therefore, this happened:
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the awkward moment when your Staffie puppy towers over your tree on his hind leg.
You can't see the tree? Neither could Cleo the Mastiff, who knocked the tree over just minutes after this picture was taken...and she looked so surprised. Like, "Wha....how the...how did that got there?"
So I went to Mordor and shelled out $49 for a proper tree.
And it turns out that the length of my face is 20cm or
thereabouts.
Shut up.
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