The Christmas tree that hates Christmas!

In case you've forgotten about my creepy Christmas tree, let me refresh your memory right here. It's seriously possessed! Last year, as we disassembled the thing, I promised myself I would not deal with this stupid tree one more year.

But look! Here we are trying to figure it out again.

This time....... without Seth.

But lest I start getting all wimpy weepy about that, enter Eli and Amanda to the rescue. They are so smart. And helpful. It's a dang good thing they moved in here a month before Seth left on his mission, or things could be really bad.

We decided to pull out the tree extra early to see if a pre-Christmas miracle might occur and the thing could behave like a normal, non-possessed Christmas tree.

But the thing about miracles is they don't happen all the time; that's part of what makes them so miraculous, after all. And so it was with this haunted tree. The second we set it up, random loose branches began to fall on top of each other, just like last year. Luckily, Amanda had this brilliant idea to use zip ties to hold the loose branches in place. Okay, admittedly, I didn't even know what zip ties were (remember how I was napping in Heaven during the distribution of talents?), but she and Eli were sure this would work.

And they were right! Here's Amanda strategically tying up all the lose branches, one at a time. Zip ties for the win!

Could it be this easy? Could our troubles be over? Of course not! Next began the saga of the lights. I always thought a pre-lit Christmas tree would be so easy. You set the thing up, fluff out the branches, plug in the cord, and voila! From top to bottom, the glorious tree lights up, shining forth in the darkness. The symbolism of Christ bringing light to a dark, desperate world warms your soul yet again. It's the magic of Christmas!

Except this tree doesn't seem to understand its role in all of this.

"It's the Christmas tree that hates Christmas," Amanda remarked, and she and Eli spent hours searching up and down, inside and out, over and under branches in attempt to connect the cords in the right order and bring forth light.

"Oooh, I think I found it right here. Now I just need the other one."

"You need a male or a female?"

"A male."

"Dang, I only see a female."

"Try switching these two."

"Hooray, we have the bottom half lit up! Halfway there."

"Okay, now try plugging that one into this one here."

"No! now the bottom lights are off again."

On and on it went, the painstaking process of lighting this stupid tree. I suggested multiple times that they give up. Really, this isn't fun. Go do something fun. They persisted.

In the end, we could never get the entire tree lit at the same time, and I'll likely need to buy a short string of lights to go in the middle, but whatever. It's fine.

I'm just happy to be dealing with it now, not late in the season (you know, like the night before my annual cookie exchange party, or worse (!) Christmas Eve). We'll get it all worked out and have a lovely tree.

For now, we have this: