My wife bought me a cheap little plastic six foot Christmas tree in college.
I loved that little tree, sadly that $14 investment broke after about seven years. I tried to replace the stand with another cheap tree from Dollar General, but it didn’t work.
Finally, it was time for a real tree.
We arrived at the Christmas tree farm and were faced with two choices: We could take a tractor ride out into the tree field or buy a tree that was already cut. We noticed the tractor rides were all made up of the same types of families, one person was happy, the rest looked absolutely miserable. We headed over to the pre-cut trees. Thankfully.
We picked out our tree, set it up in our living room, filled it up with water and for the first 24 hours, it looked great. The tree slowly opened up and took over a good portion of our living room. The strangest thing happened though, it never drank a drop of water. I checked every day and the water level never dropped, not a bit. After a couple of weeks of checking, I noticed a smell coming from the water, a bad smell. My tree was dying a slow painful death and smelled like vomit, something needed to be done.
I decided some serious intervention would need to take place if this tree was going to see Christmas morning.
The first thing I did was change the vomit water. Since the tree was still in the stand I wasn’t able to simply dump the water out. I needed to be creative. My wife handed me a baby “snot sucker” suction bulb and told me to suck the water out. I grabbed an empty bottle of Tanqueray and started filing it with sucked out vomit water. The irony of the whole thing was the empty gin bottle smelled like a fresh Christmas tree.
I also drilled some holes in the trunk, hoping the water would be able to go in the tree that way, but no luck. I wasn’t sure how many holes to drill, but stopped drilling after my drill bit broke off and stuck in the tree.
My wife Googled, “dying Christmas tree,” and one suggestion was giving it aspirin, so we crushed up some aspirin and gave that a shot too, talk about desperate.
Sadly, despite our best efforts, the tree didn’t make it and out the door it went Christmas Eve morning.
Next year we may be back at Wal-mart looking for the perfect $14.99 tree.
-Pete