I was given a poinsettia yesterday.  This kind gesture made Josie so excited that she insisted we put up the Christmas tree.

When you're a kid, there's a whole long, slow year between Christmases.  Between taking down the tree and putting it back up is an interminably long school year, a lovely green spring, a long, lazy fun packed summer, the start of another school year, a whole new grade, a birthday, change, change, change.  The year draws to a close, dark falls earlier and earlier and there's finally a hint of snow in the air.  It's time for Christmas!  Putting up the tree is like welcoming your best friend back to town and it's so exciting you feel like you just slammed a coke and there's a burp the size of Nebraska ready to burst out of your guts!

When you're an adult there's only eleven quick months between taking the darn thing down and my God! do I have to put that thing back up again? I JUST TOOK IT DOWN.

This is why they've come up with the pre-lit, pre-decorated tree.  Instead of a trip to the woods, involving hiking, choosing and chopping down a tree, tying it up and hauling it home on top of the car, as though you hunted it down and killed it with your bare hands, although I guess you did, then setting it up in the living room, trimming it to fit beneath the ceiling, stringing lights and hanging ornaments, now we just open the closet, pull out the tree and open it like an umbrella.

I love modern life.

I don't' have a pre-lit tree.  I bought my tree for $25.00 at Target the day after Christmas about four years ago.  It's a beauty; three parts, folds up and down.  Easy as pie to put up but I still have to light it myself.  I'm a stickler on lights.  I don't just string them on the outer tips of the branches, no not me.  I have to wrap each branch in lights from the trunk to the tips.

Sometimes I hate my artistic sensibilities.

This year half our lights didn't work. (What do you do when this happens to a pre-lit tree?) Strings of lights are so cheap these days that I no longer waste a moment of time checking for burnt out bulbs to replace.  A string doesn't work, or only half of it does?  Chuck it.

I got the six strings that still worked onto the lower part of the tree and had to make a run to the store.  An hour, seven strings of lights and a new Christmas CD by Josh Groban later, I finished lighting the shrub.

Josie and I decorated it and it looks great.

I just wish that in a month I could shove the whole thing into a cupboard for next year.