Banana Bread: Bringing Home the Tree

It was the bleary-eyed Sunday of Thanksgiving. I had been-out-of-the-house-three-days-worth of tasks on my mind, and I could hear Monkeys1&2 upstairs raising Cain. Too many hours strapped in car seats, too many late nights, and now they were gearing up for a wild day. My husband was about to leave for his music lesson, leaving me with three crazy Monkeys and no car for several hours. My morning looked terrible.

I turned my mind to another issue. When to get the Christmas tree? Since having moving south and having children, I have opted for tree hauling on St. Nicholas' Day. However, even though this is only a week into December, the selection has been terrible. I'm not picky about branch evenness, flat spots, crooked trunks, and all the other faults of trees, but when I look in the 3 to 4 foot tree section at the hardware box store I do not want a 2 1/2 foot tree. We only fill our bay window shelf, so I want a small one, but not tiny. Perhaps we needed to get our tree earlier.

I conferred with my husband.
He only shrugged.
We are never home on Christmas (really -- never, because in ten years of marriage we always wake up Christmas morning not in our own bed but at his parents' house), so a tree in our home is perhaps not that vital in his mind. Or perhaps he distrusts my tree judgement since I had brought a potted grocery store tree into our marriage, and I only gave it up because I couldn't fit that and baby Monkey1 and the bird cage and the 20+ year old Christmas cactus in my car when we left Long Island. (We also could not fit the vacuum cleaners, but that's part of another story.)

More commotion from upstairs. My question is answered. There is no way we were all going be be alive in three hours if we stayed in the house. "Get your coats on!" I yelled.

Fifteen minutes later my husband dropped me, a hiking backpack, and the three Monkeys off in front of Home Depot. I squished the fluffy pink snow suited Monkey3 in the backpack and she shrieked with excitement. The other two Monkeys were confused. "Why are we here? Where's Dad going?"

We toured the tree area and then went inside to ooo and ahhh and point and exclaim over the lawn inflatables, lighted animals, giant Nutcrackers, and battery operated singing toys/decor.

Delight satisfied, we picked a tree and a swag, and started to walk home, a less than two mile walk.

Suddenly, Monkey1 was cold, Monkey2 was too tired, Monkey1 said it was too far, Monkey2 wanted her bus pass, Monkey1 refused to go another step, ...
"You can stay here," I retorted. "Dad can come pick you up at two o'clock, or whenever he's done."
(There's a headline for you: Mother of three abandons children to carry home Christmas tree.)
Monkey1 grudgingly kept walking.
I pointed out that half-way home was a grocery store, and we could stop and buy doughnuts or something.
This cheered the Monkeys considerably, and not too far later, Monkey1 pointed out that the drug store was closer, could we stop there instead?

So we did. I expect people gave me some funny looks, walking in with a three-foot Christmas tree under one arm and a baby in my backpack, but we bought a box of chocolate covered brownies and pink strawberry flavored milk and walked out again without knocking anything over. We stopped in a bus stop shelter and enjoyed our snack, Monkey3 was asleep, and then on we went.