Tis the Tree-son to be lazy.

It's been a really crazy couple of months. So crazy, that Christmas has crept up on us like an over-confident P plater in his hotted up Lancer that you catch a glimpse of in your rear view right before they suddenly tear past in a concerted effort to break the sound barrier or the land speed record in the vain hope that a muffler that would fit a grapefruit will compensate for a lack of length in the trouser department. 

Each year it seems to crash on us and leaves us dazed and confused, as if returning home and finding Channing Tatum has broken in and is drinking your booze in your kitchen without a shirt on- it's not entirely unwelcome, but nevertheless extremely disorientating and you're not convinced it's actually happening outside your head.

"Oh, hey. How do you like your eggs?"
Fertilised.

Husband and I almost just need a moment to clear the calendar... stay in bed for a week (without children anywhere nearby)... and recover from Christmas.

Which hasn't even happened yet!

In between lightning strikes which killed off appliances and air conditioning, along with 3 dogs & 5 puppies, we edged ever-nearer to the big event until we suddenly realised we hadn't even put up the Christmas tree. How were we going to successfully remind the kids that the colourfully-wrapped abundance coming in could be suddenly removed should their behaviour not be sufficiently angelic?

For weeks, I'd been seeing friends on Facebook post photos of carefully decorated trees, with co-operative children in front of it (I'm convinced someone was holding a pistol to them out-of-frame) with captions declaring that their kids had (together!) enjoyed successfully decorating it so beautifully. Of course there's siblings in the world that don't argue or throw ornaments from one side of the room to each other on occasions like Christmas tree assembling... Just not in my house.

Considering it was Husband's birthday not long ago, I figured we had a bit of time up our sleeves before we had to dive head-long into the madness. It was now half a handful of days until Christmas, and our living room was still barren and empty except for the bits of whatever the pups had found and torn apart during the night.

"The stuff all over the floor? I'm as surprised as you are.
I was just sunbaking and it all exploded."

And therein lay the problem. When we considered putting up our lovely, plastic, fibre-optic tree with its endearing tinsel anacondas and shiny baubles, it became immediately apparent that we might as well baste the whole thing in bacon and BBQ sauce and yell "hey pups, come get it!" 

Like, seriously. They chew power cables. All the time. Snap, crackle and pop, and next thing you know you have a hot dog. A vision of three kids emerging to find every Christmas gift strewn across the house in pieces and five innocent canine faces staring up in self-satisfaction made it clear: we needed another option.

So, now Christmas is two days away, and we are getting excited. In fact, we are so excited, that we finally "put up" a Christmas tree! Here it is, complete with star, tinsel, and... blu tac, scraping in just in time to wake up to Christmas Eve tomorrow. It took a grand total of 20 minutes to create, because I am a perfectionist, but eventually gave up on precision because the blu tac was too far entwined within the tiny tinsel shreds. Nevertheless... Ta-daaa!

And all those presents? Totally from other people who are actually organised this Christmas, and we needed somewhere to put them that wasn't in every random corner of the house getting lost under food scraps and paperwork. They're also on top of a little table, far from the miniature jaws of canine terrors and their attendant destruction - The 4 year old is already mentally prepared to do that whenever he gets the OK in two sleeps' time...