My Crooked-ass Christmas Tree

When I was a kid, we always went to a Christmas tree lot to get our tree, generally during the weekend after Thanksgiving, because that was the weekend my mom deemed that the house had to be decorated. There was no Christmas at all before Thanksgiving, then it exploded into our house by the end of that weekend. We had a big house and never had less than a 10' tree, so this was no small feat, especially since we decorated the entire downstairs and outside of the house, too.

In some ways, a big Christmas tree is easier than a small one. For one thing, a bigger tree has a real trunk. Christmas tree stands like real trunks. It's actually really difficult to find a good stand for a small Christmas tree, small being trees no more than six feet tall. Even using the smallest stands we could find, we always had problems with the trees staying upright. So, a few years ago, we switched to these stands they provide at the tree farm (don't worry, they're free-range trees) where we get our tree every year.

See that spike there in the middle? The tree goes right down on that. Or maybe you all know that? I have no way of knowing whether these things are commonplace or not. As far as I know, there wasn't anything like this when I was a kid, and I've never seen these kinds of stands at the store. I've only seen that at the farm where we hunt our tree.

So let's go with the assumption that you've never seen one of these before, in which case you are probably wondering how you get a tree onto that spike. It's not by hammering the stand. Actually, the guys at the farm -- stock pond for trees? I think hunting a tree at a tree farm is kind of like fishing in a stock pond -- have this contraption for drilling a hole in trunk so that it slides down onto that spike. It should be an easy process; in fact, it has always been an easy process in the past. We've never had a leaning tree before.

But this year... Well, the guy helping me was new, evidently. I say that because, as soon as he took the tree over to drill it, he asked for someone to help him. Still, not a big deal. Except that no one came over to help him, so he started trying to put the tree on the contraption by himself, then he yelled over at me to see if I thought it looked straight. I say "yelled" because I was at least 30' away, back where, you know, the customers are supposed to be. Which means I only had one view of the tree, and it looked fine from where I was standing.

So I was kind of shrugging at the guy, because I didn't feel like I was a good person to ask when, finally, one of the guys who has been there a long time hollered over that the tree wasn't straight. He started coming over but, then, some guy who was closer came over and the other guy went back to what he was doing. Now, the first guy finally had help... except, then, the two guys started arguing over how to do it (making me believe the "helper" was also new), the tree started swaying around, they seemed to come to some agreement, almost dropped the tree, re-straightened the tree, and, finally, drilled it.

I thought that was the end of the story. Like I said, we've never gotten a tree that leans before. But...

We got the tree home, I got out a stand, I worked the hole in the bottom of the trunk down onto the spike, and... We have a crooked-ass Christmas tree. [See, I said I was going to start using that word more. Ass, that is.] Seriously, the tree lists about 10 degrees off of the perpendicular.

And, yes, because I know you're going to ask: I did try to take pictures, but, due to the way I have the tree situated -- you know, to minimize the tilt -- you can's tell from the pictures how bad it is. And they didn't come out all that well, anyway. I should have taken pictures while I was putting it up before we had it all decorated and stuff, but I was distracted by trying to make it look like the tree wasn't about to fall into the middle of our living room. So, no, there will be no Christmas tree pictures, this year.

However, there should be Christmas Day pictures and stuff as usual. You know, after Christmas Day happens. And, maybe, once I get the tree taken down and stuff, I'll get some pictures of it outside so that you can see how crooked it is. Maybe I should have just taken it back...
My mom did that once. Um, twice, actually.
I thought I'd told that story before, but I'm not seeing it in my old posts. It's kind of a funny story...

Guns and Adverbs: Part 1

I'm not a big fan of guns. I never have been. Well, that may not exactly be true. I suppose, when I was a kid, I liked guns. I do know that I wanted to go hunting. Everyone in my family hunted. Well, all the men did, at any rate (along with one aunt), which included my cousin who was three years older than me and my childhood idol. As far as I can remember, he always hunted, and, for all I know, that may have been true (knowing my uncle (because it was his wife that was the hunting aunt)). What I do know is that my cousin was hunting by the age of seven, because he got a deer that year. So I wanted to hunt, too.

For whatever reason, my mom really just blocked the whole thing, like she did with me playing any kind of sports when I was a kid (my brother both hunted and played sports). I got this whole thing about how I couldn't hunt until I had my own gun, but I couldn't have a gun until I learned how to handle one, but I didn't have a gun, so I couldn't learn how to handle one. It was all very frustrating to me as a kid. By the time my grandfather decided to just take me out hunting despite the fact that I had never held anything more powerful than a BB gun, I had really lost interest. That was middle school, probably 8th grade, in fact. I took a comic book with me, an edition of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe

which was nice and thick so that it would keep me busy for a while, and we sat in the deer stand. We didn't see anything. I sat and read until it got too dark to see, then we walked back to the farm. I never went hunting again. I never learned how to use a gun.

Because I don't know how to use a gun, I don't own one. Of course, I have no intention of using one, so it would be rather superfluous to bother to have one in my house. That would just be asking for trouble.

I'm pretty sure most people don't approach the whole gun thing that way, though. After all, they look pretty simple to use, right? TV and movies make them look easy to use. Just point and shoot. Of course, the truth is  they are not easy to use, and they are certainly not easy to use responsibly. This leads to all sorts of problems too numerous to mention, but, if you're reading this, you're probably aware of gun issues whether you approve of them or not.

And that's the catch, because there are so many issues with guns, people are tempted to call the gun itself bad or wrong. The gun, though, is just a thing. As long as no one's holding it, it just sits on the table doing nothing.

But! But, to keep people from using them inappropriately, what we want to do is to say "no one should use guns." Forget being educated on proper usage and safety, just don't do it! And you know what, I get it. I understand that temptation. It's oh so much easier to prohibit than to teach.

Of course, there are legitimate uses for guns, not the least of which is protection against other people misusing them, not that I'm advocating owning a gun "for protection;" I'm just saying. The truth is that if I ever needed to use a gun, I mean needed to use one, I would be unprepared, and that would not be a good thing. That makes me think that gun safety courses should possibly be mandatory just like drivers education is mandatory.

Of course, it might not do much good; look at the number of automobile accidents we have every year.

At any rate, the point is that a gun is a tool. It's the user that determines what happens with it, which is the same for any tool. The problem with guns is that they are so powerful. Like pit bulls. [Pit bulls have not been shown to be any more violent than other breeds of dogs; however, when there is an incident with a pit bull, the victim tends to fare much worse than in other dog attacks because the jaws of a pit bull are so much more powerful than those of other dogs.] Because gun usage can end up being an all or nothing affair, people tend to react with an all or nothing attitude.

What we end up with is a bunch of people running around saying, "Don't use guns! Don't use adverbs!"

"Guns are bad! Adverbs are bad!"

Yeah, I just threw adverbs into the mix, because adverbs are just like that gun lying on the table. A thing. Neither bad nor good but very effective when used properly and very damaging when used improperly. But adverbs are so very easy to misuse and can destroy a manuscript, so what you get are people saying, "Don't use adverbs! Bad! Wrong! No!"

However, the correct position on adverbs is not abstinence but education.