Steams of light flickered on Mountain Road as “White Christmas” rang in my ears. “Oh, no,’ I thought to myself as I was nearing the end of Route 100,”a traffic jam”. However, as I approached I realized that it was the string of lights above the live Christmas trees for sale near the golf center. I love this time of the year. Pasadena gets into the festive mood with the help of live tree stands and wreaths with their red velvet bows appearing on front doors, posts, and neighborhood signs.
One Christmas instead of a live tree we bought an artificial tree and decorated it with glass colored balls and strings of colored lights. Tinsel was not in fashion anymore so I decided to put fake snow on all the branches. I carefully placed the flakey stuff on each waiting bough. Perfect. Looked like a tree in the book, The Mitten – an outdoor evergreen with snow. Only mine was better; it had lights. Now we needed to clean our home to be ready for the holidays.
I got out the shampoo steamer for the carpet and busied myself with the task. My husband came to help and being a perfectionist wanted to get the edge near the tree. “I’ll just move the tree and you can clean the carpet.” He grabbed the tree securely by the trunk and slowly moved it with not a ball complaining. At that moment, I looked up and what to my wondering eyes should appear but snow falling all over the carpet in a blizzard of a storm. “The cord. I forget to unplug the cord,” he hollered staring at a pile on the floor that looked nothing like a tree. Then he stormed out the front door. Our children, peeking around the corner through the falling snow, saw white gooey footprints in the carpet where their Dad had been. ”Dad wanted to walk outside to see the lights of Pasadena,” I suggested with a smile and thought a pipe clamp might fix the halved tree.
