Tonight, Alane and Da Chimpz decorated the Christmas tree. And what a tree... The moral of the story: never select a tree when it's raining and all you want to do is get in from the cold.

I dragged the tree into the house last night and fetched the big steel tree stand we've been using for years. The trunk did not fit into it. So I got a wood-chisel and hammer and made wacky totem-pole carvings into the base until we could work it snugly into the upper steel ring of the stand.

Then we stood the tree upright.

Well, "upright" may be an overstatement.

The friggin' tree is bent. The trunk is bow-shaped and the branches don't do much to hide the deformity. With the trunk barely squeezing into the stand there wasn't much we could do to adjust the pitch or yaw of our hunchback tree... all we could do was tighten the bolts and rotate the slope-shouldered monster so it was "lunging" at you head-on, making the slouch somewhat less noticeable (until you look at it from the side, which at a quick glance might make you feel like you've stepped into one of the bad guys' hideouts on an old Batman episode).

Anyway, Cookie and I strung the lights onto the tree this afternoon, and now all the ornaments have been hung. It looks pretty good, our nodding, goosenecked Christmas tree. It'll be like celebrating the holidays in the fun-house.

Then again, pretty much every holiday is like that around here.