O Christmas Tree

One of the things that I've come to realize about Seasonal Affective Disorder is that it encourages procrastination. Everything seems like such a huge effort that it's just easy to put things off during the limited time one is awake.

These pictures are a good example.

This is my Christmas tree. No, these are not the pictures that I kept promising to post way back in December after my super-skinny tree finally settled and I decorated it.

These pictures, my friends, were taken this morning.

Yes, for more than three months (the entire season of winter, if you want to really be damning), this tree has stood in my living room. Now, I do have a tendency to put off taking down the tree, but even for me, this is a record.

To be honest, I just kept forgetting about it. We don't use our livingroom in the winter because it's quite cold. Add to that the fact that I'm doing the "Clean Sweep" thing on the house and using the livingroom as a temporary storage area, and the tree was behind a huge barricade of Rubbermaid totes and cardboard boxes, and, well ... These things just kind of happen. (The first step is admitting you have a problem, right?)

One interesting thing that I will share, in case you haven't had a Christmas tree in your house for three months and one week, is that after a certain period of time, the needles become very hard and sharp. In other words, as I was undressing it this morning, the Christmas (almost Easter) tree started fighting back! It didn't draw blood, but darn close.

I've swept up most of the needles, I think, but I'm sure we'll be finding them for months to come. Especially since the tree attacked just about everything in its path on the way out the front door. (I wonder if the student who lives across the street noticed.)

I've been doing some thinking.

I think next year we'll go artificial -- just in case.