A Christmas memory

One Christmas memory of mine is the year my mom and dad went out and bought a REAL tree. We’d never had a real tree in my lifetime before then. I remember being so excited and how I couldn’t wait for them to get home with our first real tree.
Our house had a big picture window looking out to the front and when they got home, my dad stopped in front of the window to display our new tree. My heart sank. Imagine, if you will, Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree. I wondered how they could have bought such an ugly tree. I remember the biggest smile on my mom’s face. Oh how that woman loved to play tricks on people. (Something she’d learned growing up)
It turned out that the tree was beautiful on the other side and that only about a third of it was a Charlie Brown tree. They must have gotten a great bargain, and my mom, being the incredibly smart woman that she was, realized that we would just put that tree in a corner and that back side would never be seen. When it was decorated, I felt like there had never been a tree a beautiful as ours.

(this is just a photo I grabbed from google images…and we never had a fireplace, either.)
Of course this is a great memory. But one thing makes it even better. Our cats. You can imagine that a tree with not many branches on one side and the other side all decked out in ornaments might not be so balanced. Add the weight of one curious cat and you have a recipe for a very funny story. Yup, that tree went down with the cat. Broke some ornaments and spilled the water out of the tree stand. I can only wish there had been home videos back in those days and that one had been pointed at that tree.