Oh Christmas "NAMU"

We started planning this year for our Christmas tree about the first week of November. Since our family started, we have tried to get real trees. When we lived in Utah, we had some beautiful fir trees that were very full and gave off a wonderful smell. We had a fake tree our first year in Maryland but we were out of town most of December and so we would not have been there to enjoy it even if it had been real. The last two years in Maryland we found some pretty good trees at Home Depot. Though real trees are a bit of a mess with the critters that come it with them, the needles and the sap, there is something magical about a real tree that at least for me, brings back great memories that managed to turn our small apartment into a cozy winter cottage every year. It is possible to get a real tree in Korea, the scouts sell them on base. Our problem was how were we going to get rid of it after Christmas. Our apartment is very picky about trash. You have to separate all of your metal, glass, paper, plastic and food. everything that does not fit into those categories, belongs in a special garbage sack that you have to buy at the little store at the base of our apartment building. If you want to throw away something large like a household appliance, you have to make an appointment with a trash collector, and pay them to take it away. I had nightmares trying to visualize a way to get a real tree out of our place, into an elevator and into the trash room. I contemplated cutting it into small pieces and putting them into the proper bags to dispose of the tree... no matter what I thought of, the solution did not seem rational. So we began our hunt for a fake tree. We finally found one we liked at the Costco by our church. It has ends on each branch that look like real needles... however it was not pre-lit. For those of you that don't know me, I take lighting my tree very seriously (almost to Griswold proportions). As a kid up till after I moved out, I would decorate 2 or 3 trees a year, and these weren't just ordinary trees, they were the Cottrell family trees (8 feet X 8 feet X 8 feet of treacherously prickly pinion pines) They were lit with thousand of bulbs each, and I am not talking about puny LED twinkle lights, these were 3 inch bulbs "for external illumination only", heat your house, lights. For weeks after the task my arms would be covered in sap and puncture wounds. But the magic was all worth it. We did not bring any lights with us to Korea and the PX only sells lights that plug into 120V outlets, at the wonderful price of $14 per 60 bulb string of cool LED bulbs. Luckily we were shown the way to a Christmas market in down-town Seoul that sold strings of 480 lights for the equivalent of about $8. I bought a string of 600 white lights and 8 strings of colored lights. I meticulously wound around each branch it took about a week. After putting on the 5th string of colored lights, the 3rd string shorted out so I had to take it off and replace it. When all was said and done there was a grand total of 3,690 lights on our tree.
We have a few new ornaments, each of the kids got a teacup for our Disneyland trip in February.
Addy also got a care bear ornament, and Logan an Optimus Prime ornament.
We found this Tinkerbell ornament at the PX and thought it would work as our angel equivalent.
Here is the finished product. It has a nice shape and all it is missing is the smell.
To celebrate, we inflated a couple of air beds, made some popcorn and hot chocolate, watched a couple of Christmas movies and slept out under the tree.