Last-Minute Christmas

Leftover trees anyone?How do you have a last-minute Christmas and still make it special? This question was answered on Friday night when my friend Lee determined she would not be leaving town for the holiday, choosing to stay home with her boyfriend Jordan. "But what will we do? We don't have any plans!" Fretted Jordan... Little did he know that Christmas was coming home to him.

After a much-needed Friday evening happy hour, Lee and I split a taxi back to the neighborhood, and made a quick stop at the local tree lot. Tree lots aren't something I know too much about since we always had an artificial tree in my family, so the strangeness of the urban forest is still discomforting to me. It could be that those tree lot people are always so creepy - they're a bit like carnies: weird, rummy, crusty, staggering, and only appearing on a seasonal basis. Yet very helpful to a pair of girls rolling home from happy hour on the Friday before Christmas - we had assistance to spare.  

Lee & her new friend size up the tree..."We need the Charlie Brown-est of all the Charlie Brown Christmas trees." Lee commanded. This meant short, lopsided, funny-looking, but still alive and kicking. Luckily, this is all that's left at a tree lot this close to the holiday. There is something a little melancholy about a tree lot only three days before Christmas: what happens to all those trees if they don't get brought home by someone? It's like all the leftover pumpkins after Halloween - do they get sent to the pumpkin pie cannery? Where do they go? I kept these existential questions to myself however, since time was of the essence and Lee needed to get home with a tree post-haste.

We found a perfect specimen of Charlie Brown Christmas: short, bushy, a little off-kilter, but still very much a charming tree.

Sigh! A tree by the hearth...Jordan didn't quite know what to believe when two wine-inebriated girls toting a Christmas tree showed up at his door saying "Merry Christmas Charlie Brown!" But confidentially, I think he was touched. After all, he knew exactly which OnDemand station had the Yule Log burning, and that little tree looked so good sitting next to it. Lee promptly dug deep into the garage to find her one box of Christmas decor, and we quickly went to work on the lights. There wasn't much to work with, but there was some nice ribbon, and some never-sent Christmas cards from years past that got converted into paper ornaments. The end result was charming, happy, and crafted from the heart.

It's a nice thing to bring someone Christmas, even if it's last-minute.