The Day Before

It's a couple of days after Thanksgiving, and while many of you are putting up your Christmas trees, we just took ours down.

The front room seems empty now. We've had a Christmas tree up since the end of July. We've had two up since probably September. We've decorated it and re-decorated it at least a dozen times - trying to figure out what works and what doesn't. Now, on the day before Decorating Day for the Festival of Trees, we think we are ready.

Yesterday we took all four Whittle trees over to a warehouse in Salt Lake City to reinforce them according to the Festival rules.

We put piece of PVC pipe in the base of the each tree and clamped a six and a half foot piece of rebar
to each of them. Normally, this step is done at the South Towne Expo Center on Decorating Day, but since we had four trees to deal with, we wanted to get it done early so that we could focus on the decorating part on Monday.

We also used self-tapping screws to secure each section of the tree to each other.

This is actually the first time all four trees have been up in the same room at the same time.

After they were ready, we loaded them up into the back of a truck for transport.

Then Mom took the whole family out to eat at Buca Di Beppo's where we ordered more food than we could possibly eat.

So, that's it. We are almost ready to do this.

Almost a year of preparation and it has all come down to this.

We will be at the South Towne Expo Center tomorrow morning as close to 7am as we can be.

Let's do this.