The Leaning Tower of Christmas Tree

Saturday we had a Christmas decorating adventure. As we pulled our our pathetic fake Christmas that I bought on clearance after Christmas of 2004, we found out that when we put everything away last year, we managed to misplace the slats for the bottom that make the tree stand up.

Enter Doug "Never Give Up! Never Surrender!" I run upstairs for a bit and when I come back he's found this old pbc pipe in the garage and is doing this with it and duct tape.
Okay, I think, sure, why not? It does seem to be working, that is until I put the lights on it, then we get this...
So he wrangled with it for a bit and got it to stand up right, so I think, great! Let's decorate this thing. (The other thing I was thinking is we are SO buying a new tree after Christmas this year when they are on clearance...)

Bryson got to go first, since its his first Christmas and he only has one ornament to put on the tree.
Buying Hallmark ornaments for each of the kids is a tradition for my family. I've been buying one for Doug and I, too since I'm in the middle of collecting a series and I can't stop until they finish this series (and I hope they do it soon, its a series of mischievous cats, and they're are cute, but our tree is starting to look like a crazy cat lady's tree.)
Sariah put her's on next. This year she choose a blond angel. I think it looks a bit like her, so I'm pleased with her choice. She was leaning towards Ariel for awhile before choosing this one, which would've been fine as well. I just don't want her to regret any of her ornaments like I do one or two of mine. (The disastrous Hugabunch ornament of '86 comes to mind...)
After we got the tree decorated, Sariah did some dancing for us to Christmas music. I managed to upload all our Christmas music to my ipod, which is great, but she only wants to listen to the fast songs, so I might need to make some playlists just for her...
This was also the point where we realized that the tree was leaning again, and all the tape in the world wasn't going to keep it upright. So Doug ran to the store and bought a tree stand for $7.50. The problem then was that the slats for the new stand didn't fit in the tree slots, nor did the old tree base fit in the new stand.

So now we've got a fully decorated tree, that I'm basically holding upright because it has no base. Long story short, after breaking the tree in half, using 2 wrenches and a lot of muscle, we got the tree in the new base and it back together. Its sitting pretty downstairs. Whew, what an adventure!

(And I now realize I don't have a picture of the finished product. I'm too lazy to go downstairs and take one, so I'll post it later... :) )