Christmas tree chaos!

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Hello everyone, I hope you had a good Christmas! Sorry I haven’t been around much, family stuff took over (as it should of course!) But I have one story I just have to share with you. Shortly before Christmas I visited a friend. Her house was looking all Christmassy and a real tree was up in the lounge and nicely decorated. But then she told me the story behind it. My friend went to buy a tree from a local Sea Scout group, who hold a charity Christmas tree sale every year. They have a heap of trees of different sizes and each is enclosed in a sort of net stocking to hold it together. Well she chose a tree of the height she wanted, and loaded it into the car. As she closed it in she noticed her hands were rather dirty but didn’t think too much of it – the ground was rather wet (we had an awful lot of rain in early December) and anyway it was dark – in mid winter it is fully dark here by 4 pm. She drove home, got the tree out of the car, and carried it through the front door, down the hall and into the living room. Again, she noticed that her hands, and now also her clothes, seemed grubby but she didn’t stop to give it too much thought. She excitedly cut the netting off the tree – and then the branches all sprang out and flung loads of mud everywhere! What must have happened was that the cut tree had been dragged through lots of wet mud when it was harvested. Then it had all been wrapped up so it wasn’t noticeable. Obviously she didn’t want her living room filled with mud! She also didn’t want to struggle with the now bushy unwrapped tree back down the hall to the front door, making lots more mess on the way. What she really wanted was to open the door from the living room direct into the garden and get it outside – but she couldn’t because the door was locked and her younger daughter had lost the key! So instead she dragged it into the downstairs bathroom, shoved it into the bath, and tried to give it a shower. This was much more difficult than expected as it was quite a big tree, mud just kept coming off it, the bath kept filling up with mud and the branches just caused the muddy water to splash all over the room, covering towels etc. in mud splashes! Finally she did manage to get it clean, left it to dry, cleaned up all the mud in the house and eventually the decorated tree looked lovely and you would never know about the trauma. I tried to be sympathetic but I admit that by the time it got to the bathroom stage I had to try really hard not to laugh! Hope your Christmas decorating was less dangerous! I don't have a picture of her tree so here's a picture of our village Christmas tree. All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2025.