Where’s Waldo?

Lemme change that. This has nothing to do with Waldo. It’s even more puzzling than Waldo, with even more exhausting results.

See, the wife went and bought a Christmas tree on Wednesday, even though I told her I’d go with her on Thursday (yesterday). You know how it is when you have an itch to do something? No one or nothing is going to stand in your way. That’s how she felt yesterday. And, knowing how I really want to get an artificial tree, she decided (I think) to trump me and get a real one right away.

Fine and dandy. I told her I’d put it up yesterday and get the ball rolling. She said great, she’d go dig out the Christmas ornaments and such.

Well, I was ready around noon time and told her to go get the tree stand, I’d wait.

About a half hour later (a half hour!), she came to tell me she couldn’t find the stand or any of the ornament boxes. So I helped her look. We opened every closet and cupboard, looked in every nook and cranny, under the beds, in the drawers … a lot of where we looked didn’t make sense because the stuff was in two pretty big boxes.

She swears she had them “right there” and now they’ve disappeared. Goodness gracious.

But y’know, in the general scheme of things, it was no big deal, at least not anything worth crying over (except for some special ornaments we’d collected over the years that were given to us by dear friends). Except for the memories, everything could be replaced.

So off we went in the afternoon on a Christmas safari – found a tree stand (better than the one we had), found some coordinated ornaments and garlands and new LED lights. We got a new tree skirt that looked almost like the one we brought over from California when we moved back in 1972, we found a cute Mickey Mouse stocking for our grandson, and we even found a good deal on gift boxes.

The only thing we had trouble finding was a Christmas tree topper. We’d brought back an old-fashioned fabric Santa that used to sit all lit up on top of our tree since our first son was born. That’s 45 years ago. If there’s any ornament I’ll really miss, it’s that Santa. Oh well, that’s just the way it goes.

But … as I said, we had trouble finding a suitable tree topper. We went all over the place, and nothing really caught our fancy. I remember stores used to have lots of them on sale. Not yesterday. We settled for a star with changing light colors that’s okay … just okay … but not awe-inspiring. I think I’ll go online and see if I can get one, if not this year, then for next year.

The big question remaining is where the heck are the missing ornaments? This is going to bug the wife for a while, I’m sure. Oh well, that’s what she gets for not agreeing to get an artificial tree. Heheheh.