Monday, December 16, 2013

The Day Christmas Exploded A Week Early

This is what my living room looks like today, a whole week before Christmas.

What's that you say?  TWO Christmas trees when last week, I didn't even have one?

We have a local organization that raises money for charities- wait, yesterday's post was also about charities.  Interesting theme we have here. 

Anyway, this organization raises money for local groups by hosting what they call the Spectacle of Trees. 

To make a very long post shorter, it's basically 17 fake Christmas trees decorated and filled with gifts by 17 charities.  Each tree has a value that sometimes climbs to like $9,000.  For 10 days, the public can view the trees and buy tickets at $10 each.  Then they put the tickets into the boxes of the trees they hope to win (and the charities they want to support) and on the last night of the event, one ticket from each box is pulled.

The winner gets the tree, everything on the tree and everything in, around and under the tree.  The first year, there were really pretty trees and they each had a couple of gifts.  Fast forward 8 years and this year, one tree literally had a car with it.

The charities quickly learned that the more you give with the tree, the more people will put in their tickets and the group really scores.  For every ticket in the box for their tree, the charity gets the full $10.  Nowadays, it's not at all unusual for a group to earn $9,000 from this event.

I always go to this event and get a bunch of tickets.  I put them into all the charities I support and hope that we'll win.  I don't pay much attention to what comes with any of the trees because a) I won't win and b) it becomes such a blur that you can't remember who is giving the 55 inch tv, who is offering a trip to Maui, who has a 2002 Toyota Camry. 

So, I just toss them in.

And this year, WE WON A TREE!!!!!

And now it looks like this. 

The tree is no good.  I will not be keeping it.  It's small and fairly sparse and the decorations are not what I like.  I wish I knew of a place that could use some cheering up with a pre decorated tree.

The gifts ran the gamut.  This tree was not one of the trees with the super high values, but there were some pretty good things that came with it.  Some we will give away, some we will not be able to use and don't know who to give them to and some might get sold so we can finally move into the modern age and get a tv that wasn't made in 1990.

Another plus is that all of those boxes are actually empty.  They were just decoys under the tree.  I love the red wrapping paper and will definitely be using it for gifts this year.  K-ster is currently wrapping his gifts in the other boxes by opening one end and putting the gifts in the empty box and then resealing.

Everyone wins.

Except we now have to clean up all of this crap so we can live in this house and not trip over things left and right!

2 comments:

  1. I can't believe you actually won! That's pretty cool.

    ReplyDelete
  2. what kind of things did you actually win?
    Mom

    ReplyDelete

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