The Enormous Tree

Well, this year I’m having Christmas with’s Beth’s family, and they happen to have a lot of room for a tree. So Beth had suggested that they try to get a large tree this year because I was going to be there and this year might be a good year to have a big tree since I would be around to help put it up and stuff and in order to impress me.

And so today we (Beth, Mary and I) went off to retrieve the tree. Beth’s father had previously gone to the Christmas Tree farm and picked out a tree, so all we had to do was go and get them to chop it down, load it up on top of the minivan, and drive it home. However, this turned out to be a little more difficult in practice, because the first time we went out there to fetch it, the husband was out at the gun store and thus could not cut down the tree for us. His wife said she’d call him at the gun shop and tell him to come home (they know her very well there), but she wasn’t sure he’d listen.

I wasn’t feeling quite up to wielding the chainsaw myself or lifting the tree onto the top of the car single-handedly, so we ended up returning home empty-handed. Apparently they hadn’t expected us to show up in the rain. I guess they didn’t know that Danish children love the rain. We did get to see the tree the first time, though, and noticed that it looked fairly large.

We returned later in the day when the husband had returned from the gun store. He told us that he didn’t usually work in the rain and was a little grumpy at first, but after I seemed quite willing to stand in the rain and help him, and he asked Mary to “Put down that umbrella, you pretty little thing, and help lift this heavy end of the tree”, he did seem to warm to us a little bit. At this point we were realizing that the tree was big, certainly bigger than any tree I’d every dealt with. So there we were with it strapped to the roof of the minivan, and Beth drove us slowly home. Here is a picture of it on the roof of the car after we got it back to the house.

However, once we had got the thing home, we started to realize just how big it was. In order to bring it inside, we found that we had to take it in through the front door since no other door would fit it. And trying to put it up was extremely challenging. Getting it to be stable was extremely difficult, not least because we had to get it upright from a lying down position. Most of the work was done by me and Beth’s father, David, although once it got to balancing things and checking for verticality we had some help from Beth and Mary and Peggy, as is shown here.

This picture does nothing to give you an idea of the full scale of the tree, however, since you can see neither the top or the bottom of it. In fact, I wasn’t able to take any pictures that include both the top and bottom of it. However, this picture which includes Beth next to it for scale gives a pretty good impression of its enormousness:

That window up there is the second story, yes, just for reference. And one of my chief contributions to this whole thing was lying underneath it and essentially bench pressing the entire tree so that we could slide the base underneath it and get the tree into the base. Since I haven’t been to the gym at all in god knows how long I suspect I may be aching quite a bit tomorrow. But I think it was worth the effort

Anyway, there will be more pictures tomorrow when we have it more decorated. Since we put it up it has made one sneaky attempt to escape and fall over. Fortunately it fellt into the corner rather than out of it. It’s now tethered at the top to prevent any similar attempts in the future and we believe that we have it considerably better secured at the base.

More reports tomorrow, post-decorating.