Facebook Twitter Pinterest  photo insta.jpg Email RSS YouTube

Year Of The Paper Christmas Tree–Christmas Mishap

1983, the “Year Of The Paper Christmas Tree” is a Christmas I will treasure for the rest of my life.  It is both one of the saddest and funniest Christmases I have experienced (so far).

It started a few weeks before Christmas when we went to pick out our “fresh cut” Christmas tree.  It was perfect!  In the weeks leading up to Christmas our perfect tree began to lose some needles, but what real tree doesn’t lose a few needles-right?

Christmas Eve brought a terrible snow storm and some of the coldest temps on record.  It also brought a sound, then a site, that horrified my mom…

She awoke to what she thought was the sound of running water.  She followed the sound into the living room where she witnessed what she calls “a shower of pine needles”.  Almost every needle was falling off our Christmas tree in one big cascade.  She had never seen anything like it before.

My sister and I woke shortly after my mom and freaked out when we saw what was left of our beautiful tree–ornaments, stringed popcorn, and lights on bare branches.  We cried when my mom and dad told us we had to get rid of our tree because it was a fire hazard.  We went hysterical when they told us that it was too cold and there was too much snow to get a new tree.  We can’t have Christmas without a tree!

Then it dawned on my parents…They had gotten us finger paints for Christmas and my neighbor had a huge roll of packing paper…we would paint a tree…
tree2
Wasn’t I cute?

We took the large roll of paper and paints, went down to the laundry room of our apartment and began to paint a tree.  Half-way through, we ran out of green paint so we mixed yellow and blue and finished.  When the tree had dried, my parents hung it in the corner of our living room where the real tree had been and we proceeded to tape ornaments, lights, and our stringed popcorn on our paper tree.  It was beautiful (for a paper tree)!
Christmas morning my sister and I awoke to not many presents under our tree.  Turns out, Santa had stacked all our presents behind the tree!  No photo will ever replace the memory I have in my mind of that Christmas and our paper tree.
Do you have a Christmas mishap story from this year or a Christmas past?  Share it in the comments below!

Comments

  1. That’s a super sweet story 🙂 Glad it all worked out for you guys! I’m your newest follower, I’d love it if you followed me back 🙂 Have a great weekend and Happy New Year!
    Nicole
    http://www.craftysoccermom.blogspot.com