Frankenpine lives!

We used to use real Christmas trees, and my wife would once have declared that an artificial tree was out of the question.  It’s true, there is something about a real tree, the smell, the ambience, a real tree has character that a plastic tree lacks.    It was hard to imagine an artifical tree with as much character…but that was before Frankenpine.

As our family got larger our house got smaller and our time got leaner,and  then fate intervened and an artificial tree insinuated itself into our lives.  This wouldn’t be the first stray to show up on our doorstep and become part of our family but it would be the first plant, and a  non-living one at that.  We got a cat that way.  She showed up every day insisting she belonged to us and only wore down my resistance when she showed up with a large wound and looking particularly pitiful.  We got a bird that way, when he flew in and landed on my son’s shoulder like a parrot looking for a pirate and that was just cool. But the cat ultimately died and the bird hates me now, so I can’t say that all these ventures have exactly been successful for me.

That’s why I’m all the more proud of Frankenpine! He’s not a particularly good tree in some ways.  He won’t stand straight and he’s kind of mixed up…

Anyway, Frankie showed up one day during the short stint we had an ebay business.  Christmas was a particularly good time to make a little extra money and one year we came into posession of a closing businesses artifical trees.  They were prelit and actually nice trees, not the plastic-needles from my childhood.  The only draw back was they weren’t guaranteed to have all their pieces and we kind of had to figure out what went with what to make a full tree.    Anyway to make a long story short (too late! (name that movie quote)), when all was said and done we had sold some trees and had one left over for ourselves.  However, as it turned out, the one left over was actually two left over.  The top was from one kind of tree and the rest from another.  Thus, our hybrid tree earned the name frankenpine.  When we set him up and we discovered that he didn’t quite fit the base either and thus leaned forward at you a little like a lunging monster, we suddenly discovered he had character indeed and he has become a part of our christmas tradition for the last 4 years since.

Shield the kid’s eyes.  Here’s frankie, in his headless state.

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Now he’s got his head, but the lights don’t go all the way to the top so to speak.  Poor Frankie.  But wait…just like Frosty, once the children (Sweetly, in this case) put the angel on top (well, not just like Frosty.)…

Frankenpine Lives!  Notice how we’ve turned the lunging nature towards the wall.  It’s less scary that way 🙂

This is my dog Lucy, who insisted I put her in to make it clear that not all my strays have left or turned against me.   She loves me.  This is how she feels about decorating apparently.

And so another year, a little Christmas magic, a little chaos, some Christmas music, and 9 hard working Christmas elves and another traditional Frankenpine resurrection has been successfully completed.