the magical christmas tree
Since I only have my little girl over on weekends, time seems to pass with us like an old "stop motion" movie, like the ones where you can watch a seed grow into a flower in a matter of seconds.
Well, because of this, Christmas kind of snuck up on me and I found myself without a Christmas tree on Christmas Eve and my little girl looking up at me with big blue eyes. We went riding around in my truck looking for Christmas tree stands, but alas, they were all packed up and gone, leaving nothing but bleak parcels of asphalt in their place.
I took us to the local CVS and bought some junkie plug in decorations to try to fill in the gap, and Mariel said she thought they were neat, but I felt like a bad dad non-the-less.
But when we got home again, something kind of magical, like from a Christmas movie, happened. There in the alley, laying against the garage apartment, was this most beautiful and perfect Carolina Spruce.
"Look! It's a real Christmas tree!" Mariel said.
"It sure is!" I said, almost wondering if we were the subject of some twisted new reality show. Somebody must have been going on vacation on Christmas Eve, and didn't want their tree to shed needles in their absence, or create a fire hazzard, etc.
Not wanting to take someone else's tree that could have still been in transit, I said we would claim it if it was still laying there in the alley after dark.
"Okay," Mariel said.
We went to dinner at my folks place that evening and I told them our Christmas tree story. I asked my mom if they had a spare stand, and magically they did. Christmas spirit was all around. I took my dad for a ride in my new truck and I played him songs from the 40s on my new XM radio. He stopped smothering me with offers of juice and soda, and we had a beer together for the first time since I kicked over parking meter downtown.
When we got back to my place, the magical Christmas tree was still there in the alley. I picked it up and hoisted it over my shoulder. Mariel skipped behind me with glee as we took it into the house.
Unfortunately, the spare stand my mom gave me was actually made to hold up a tiny little artificial tree and it just wouldn't work at all on a real tree. I tried to think of different ways to prop up the tree without a real stand (like drill a wire into the ceiling and tie it to the top of the tree) but ultimately the tree just ended up getting leaned over in the corner. Then every time you tried to walk somewhere the magical Christmas tree was in the way and you had to keep moving it and it would poke you with its sharp needles and it would shed everywhere. Pretty soon, it was Christmas day and the magical Christams tree never got decorated. It just keep getting moved and around, and it poked us and it shed its needles until they filled every room in the house.
Some time after new years, I took the magical christmas tree outside and leaned it against the chain link fence. One of my Russian neighbors was outside and I tried to make and after-Christmas joke:
"Half-price on this nice caroline spruce," I said.
"Eh?" the Russian neighbor said uncomprehendingly.
"Nevermind," I said.
"Hhap-ee Nuww-yeer!" the Russian neighbor said joylessly.
I left the magical Christmas tree against the chain link fence and closed my back door, but not before seeing the magical Christmas tree fall over and hit the ground.
About twenty minutes later I looked out my back window. Evidently my garage apartment neighbor had tripped over the magical Christmas tree on the way to his door, because someone had picked it up and thrown it twenty feet further down the alley.
12:21:22 PM 
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