We were leaving it pretty late to go out Christmas tree hunting... but it was due to the fact that I was away on tour and was only briefly at home in The Netherlands on the weekend (and my wife is also crazy busy at the moment...) so that we could all go out to the local Hornbach to try and pick out a Christmas tree all together as a family. After all, this is the sort of thing that you really want to try and do all together... (well, in the end... it was more that the kids were overwhelmed by the choice and no idea... and I have no visual aesthetic eye... and so that left my wife choosing the tree!).
The previous year we had bought a tree way too early in December, and seeing as we were new to the concept of chopped Christmas tree, we did not realise that they needed to be kept watered (of course, in hindsight, that is pretty damn obvious... But my university degrees were not in practical applications...). So, we had a tree that was slowly turning brown and shedding needles everywhere... Making for some painfully prickly presents!
One of the things that we have never managed to find in the Netherlands is a star to crown the actual tree. Now, it could be because we were always looking in the wrong places... But I prefer to believe that they just didn't exist in this land until this year.
When I saw one of the dressed trees in display, the first thing I noticed was the star on the top! So, seeing as I was carrying the freshly hunted and netted tree, I sent the girls through the aisles of a busy hardware store to find them. Parenting moment of the year... Well, no injuries, it could have been worse!
We've never really had a big big tree, and the one that we picked was still relatively small at around 170-190 centimetres, but we have a really small baby car (Peugeot 107). All through the hardware store, my wife was saying that she didn't think that it would fit... I was fairly sure that it would!
However, when we got to the car... the tree was too fat to feed through the back to sit in the middle. So, I guess that technically... my wife was right. Again...
... But we did manage by sitting the tree in the front seat and having the rest of the tree squashing all the girls (wife included!) in the back... Getting constantly poked by pine needles... It also meant that my wife had no seat belt as there is no middle belt for the back seat, but if we crashed the tree would exit through the windscreen first to provide a soft and prickly landing spot for her head! Well, at least in theory....
So, I thought it was going to be a really simple exercise to mount the tree on the base... But these things seem to never go as well as you would think. The mounting plate that we had from last year's tree was this heavy bowl with a metal spike on which the tree is impaled.
The tree from last year algae a hole bored out in the bottom of the trunk so that it could readily be attached to the base. If course, the tree that we bought this year was from a different place... And no proprietary connector hole. Which meant that it was time for a bit of a messy hack!
In my incredibly limited handy man experience, I have found that large bore holes are best started with a thin bore guide hole. Now, it may be that an expert or experienced driller wouldn't need this.. But I have a habit of really screwing (ha ha... Perhaps that is what is going wrong...) up hole drilling...
Following up with the largest bore for my handheld drill (I had a larger drill size for the hammer drill, but that was in the shed and it was raining... ), a 10mm bore. I really thought that this would have been thick enough, but it wasn't... not by a long shot! So, I ended up rocking the drill bit around and using it like a razor or something like that! In fact, I felt like I was a dentist... and this time, the extra large bore hole and very thick hole wasn't due to my incompetence... but was an actual intended feature!
Still, it did make for messy work... as I was doing this in the front hallway of our house.... but did I mention that it was raining outside?!?!?
After quite a bit of drilling and coring out the hole, we finally had it done! The tree was properly impaled and it was time to cut open the netting, which was a job that fell to our oldest daughter... and I still had a little bit of time before needing to bolt out the door in time for work. However, not quite enough time to grab the vacuum cleaner and fix up the mess in the front hallway! I'm afraid that this time, that job fell to my dear wife....
When I got back, all the girl's best intentions to have the tree dressed and ready for Christmas appear to have fallen by the wayside. However, they did manage to get our star on the top! So, this coming week will be about dressing the tree... something that is best left out of my hands.
It's a pretty big tree for us, I know that bigger trees exist... but until last year, we've only had little potted ones. I'm hoping that they don't get bigger... as the problem with the car isn't ever going to go away until we buy a bigger car!
Still, it is a nice looking tree, a bit bald on the top... but still not too bad! I'll be away for the rest of the week, and I guess the girls will be dressing up the tree whilst I'm away... looking forward to seeing what they will have done with it!
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