The Leaning Tower of Pine

Heather, you inspired me. When I realized my Christmas tree was deformed, I just had to post a picture of it so people could get a good laugh from it like yours gave me. I think it must be a curse...maybe everybody who picked out their Christmas tree for FHE last Monday wound up with a less-than-perfect tree.
It looked so beautiful when we bought it. Until we took it home and put it in the tree stand. I stood eyeballing it, telling Bill "right" and "left" to get it level, while Landon lay under it ready to screw it into place. At last it was perfectly straight from all angles, except the bottom of the trunk. In order to get it to look straight on top, the trunk had to be almost diagonal in the stand.
Apparently our tree grew straight and narrow for a few years and then decided to be rebellious and change directions.
Since Monday, we have had absolutely no time to decorate our tree. It has sat, barren and pathetic since then. Payson and Macy have asked incessently every day, "when are we gonna decorate it?" Every day we said, "We'll try and do it tonight." And every night something was going on, one of us was gone, etc. So last night we said, "Tonight for sure, we promise!" We cancelled any commitments, went to Target to buy a cool new tree-topper and some new, awesome ornaments, and went home all pumped up to decorate. We put on some Christmas music to get in the decorating spirit, and got up on a chair, excited to adorn the top of our tree with our new, beautiful, sparkly star. That's when we heard the pop, and slowly the whole tree started to fall.
We knew the pop had to mean it had broken away from the screws. I jumped down and wiggled under the tree reconassaince-style, and worked the screws while Bill lifted it up from above. Finally we realized it was hopeless, it would never stay up at such an angle. The only way to keep it up was to put the trunk straight up and down, which, as I stated before, made the top of the tree slant sideways.
One hour and a couple of Mormon-substitute-swear-words later, we had a fuming, walking time-bomb named Bill, and me, picking pine needles out of my hair that were stuck there with tree sap, but at least we had a tree that would stay up, even if it was at an angle that made it look like it would fall at any second.
It was at that point that we got to tell the kids for the fourth time that we couldn't decorate the tree tonight.
So, our deformed tree that has been sitting in its sad, naked state for four days is still un-adorned, except for five Hello Kitty ornaments that Macy picked out at Target and insisted on hanging. And now it points to our kitchen instead of the sky.
Merry Christmas.