“Never worry about the size of your Christmas tree.  In the eyes of children, they are all 30 feet tall. ”

— Larry Wilde, The Merry Book of Christmas

Our Christmas tree isn’t 30 feet tall but it’s darn close.

I exaggerate a bit, but this tree is exceedingly huge. It’s really big … and so so heavy. So large it took two of us to cut and carry it out of the tree farm. So weighty that the tree stand we had wouldn’t hold it. So enormous that a trip to the hardware store was in order to get a new stand. So bulky that I ended up buying a three foot circle of plywood and heavy screws  to hold it up. So dense it took three hours to put up the tree.

That’s a lot of time to spend making a tree stand up in your living room. Then, after it’s standing you yourself stand there and wonder if it’s going to stay standing.

A lot of things in life are like that. You work really hard on something. You study it, you build it, you rebuild it, you finally make it stand up while you hang onto it tenuously hoping it will stay.

Then you let go.

Sometimes it stands, and sometimes it doesn’t but eventually you always have to let it go.   If it doesn’t stand, try again. The real value is in the effort you give.

I hope that your Christmas tree always stands up on the first try but if it doesn’t, take heart.

Our tree fell over three times tonight.

Updated the school’s reader board and spent a lot of time setting up a Christmas tree. I think everyone is glad it is finally standing.