the christmas tree disaster 2010

about two weeks ago, as i was helping my mom decorate the tree, we noticed that it was slightly off. so i started hanging more ornaments in the back to balance it out. we even shifted the tree in the stand because it wasn't sitting evenly. something about the tree was just awkward. it's a real tree so the trunk isn't perfectly straight anyway. we finally finished it around 11. it looked great! my mom is a huge ornament collector. she's got every kind of ornament you could imagine. and because she's a teacher, her students always give her ornaments as christmas presents. she's been teaching for over 30 years so as you can imagine, she's built up quite the collection. not to mention the ones she gives us (her kids) every single year. yep. every year, my brothers and i get an ornament. ya'll....we've got alot. but anyway, some of these ornaments are really nice. like really nice. some she bought in europe. some given to her by friends or students, some were designer ornaments that have been discontinued. you get the idea. they are irreplaceable and expensive.

here's a picture of our tree as we were decorating it.

so we finished putting on all the ornaments and mom is sitting in the living room searching the cabinets for the angel she decided to use this year. we've got lots of angels too. and every year we can never decide which one to use. so as mom is looking through her angels, i'm in the kitchen when all of a sudden, i hear the most god awful noise a person can hear this time of year.

crash.

i look over and the tree is gone. out of site. so i looked down, and there it was. the tree fell. yes i said fell. i know this happens to someone just about every year, but it's never happened to us. ever. and as i walked back into the living room, i looked at the floor and it looked like a glass factory had exploded across the room. every single irreplaceable ornament we had was gone. years and hundreds of dollars worth of ornaments, shattered. and when i say shattered, i mean like tiny, microscopic pieces of glass were everywhere.

i thought my mom was going to cry.

so after just staring in horror at what had just happened for about 2 or 3 min. we picked up the tree as carefully as we could and i sat on the floor for h o u r s trying to super glue the shattered pieces of christmas back together. what was salvageable anyway. but most of them were gone. i told mom "i bet when you go back to school on monday and tell everyone what happened, they'll all give you ornaments for christmas."

:(

the next week, she had her work christmas party. and what do you know. i called it. the woman came home with literally, boxes of ornaments people had given her. tons. i'm not sure of the exact amount, but she got alot. alot alot.

so we redecorated the tree with all of the new pretty ornaments and mom tied it up so the tree wouldn't fall again.

i took all of these with my phone so the quality isn't that great. but you get the idea.