We got a big-ass tree, my friends.
In true South Philly style, Rob and I always get our Christmas trees from a man named Rocky who has a spot set up under the highway and next to the Dunkin’ Donuts (literally cannot make this shit up. You know Dean and Tabitha get their tree in the same spot 😉)
This year, Rocky offered us a “big hefty BEAUTIFUL boy” (his words) and Rob and I made our usual impulsive decision of saying “yeah, sure, toss him in the van!”
This big, hefty BEAUTIFUL boy is about six feet tall and a million feet wide. Wrangling it into our very small, very narrow row home required a brute strength and patience I did not know I possessed. It then broke our tree stand — snapped it right off inside the trunk as Rob and I basically just gave up and fell over laughing.
As a temporary solution, we wedged the tree against the wall. See photographic evidence of size below — it’s so wide, we could only sit on one half of our couch. We couldn’t watch TV and it kept surprising us by just falling over towards us/onto us. Given our teeny-tiny house, we assumed once the stand arrived we’d have to re-arrange every piece of furniture to accommodate this beautiful boy’s size.
We were right.
By the next day, Walter no longer had a healthy dose of fear for this beast (even though it fell on us like at least three times). Here’s Walter taking a nap next to the tree, which by day two was just slowly sliding down the wall in a creeping fashion.
When we sat on our couch this was our literal view, I am not even lyin’ 🤣 It was just TREE ONLY TREE.
On the third full day without the delivery of the new tree stand, the situation had deteriorated rapidly:
By some kind of miracle, the replacement tree stand we ordered arrived shortly after I took this picture from our kitchen (making a kind of 😬😬 face as I did so). The tree stand is aptly called THE GOLIATH.
It took us…well, let’s just say it was a monumental team effort between us, rife with a lot of physical comedy that could have been filmed for a CW-style sitcom.
BUT NOW LOOK AT HIM. HE IS MAGNIFICENT. And we only had to move all of our furniture and rearrange our entire first floor to do this! This is normal!
….and later that night, some magic happened:
