Staying up late/ The story of my Christmas tree

Up late in my cosy blanket 'cause my body clock's all wonky after last night's work fest. It's warm in here but outside the wind is rattling the windows. Feeling very Christmassy and atmospheric, I've got the tree lights on and everything!

Normally I don't put up a tree until two weeks before Christmas day, but since we're heading to France this year I figured if we got a really small one and put it up early it'd be okay. So the Mister and I set off at the end of November to find a little tree to fit on our coffee table.

We picked the worst day to go tree shopping. No one else was out. It was raining. Not just a bit, but hard. I, stupidly, was not wearing sensible clothes. Not a coat or scarf in sight. So off we set in our campervan, windscreen wipers on full whack, and we stopped at a place not far from where we live.

We sat in the van for a while, hoping the rain will stop long enough for us to pick a tree. It didn't, so we had to make a dash for it after my Mister insisted that I go with him. The Mister quickly told the man that we wanted a small tree. The man showed us a variety of big trees. I stand there getting drenched. He pulled out an even bigger tree: fat and bushy and expensive. My makeup started to slide down my face. By this point my shoes were leaking and I wasn't sure if I was standing in a puddle or if the puddle was inside my shoes, or whether, in fact, there was no puddle and I'd miraculously been transported to the movie 'Water World'. I was not impressed. I stared into the soul of my Mister, straight faced.

"It's too big."

The rain ran down my Mister's face and he said nothing, then...

"I think you should go wait in the van."

I squelch back to the camper, full of 'bah-humbug' spirit. Soon after, I hear the Mister stuff a tree into the back of the van. Now, the fact that he had to stuff it into the van should have been a warning to me...

The "little" tree that my Mister had chosen for our coffee table swamps it. We can't use our telephone anymore. It's at the back of the tree, so our Christmas tree rings and rings and no one answers because I can find it beneath all the branches. And to make things worse there's a goat on my Christmas tree; the Mister swears it's a reindeer. I politely make my case for its goat-ness...

"It's wicker and has curly horns, why would it have curly horns if it's a reindeer?"

Then my Mister makes a good point.

"...Why would anyone make a goat to go on a Christmas tree?"

Point taken, but the tree is still huge.