Putting up the tree

Well it's Sunday afternoon and I'm sitting here with Gracie - we've spent a very nice day together. First of all we did the *quickest* dash round Tong Garden Centre to get a tree. In fact were in and out in under 20minutes. Gracie picked up the 1st tree we came to, it was perfect (she has an eye for the artistic!) and off we went. Good job too, Dan was having a claustrophobic trauma about there being too many people. He doesn't like too many people! It rather spoiled our attempts to purchase every sparkly gold thing in the building. But, never mind, we managed to get 150 lights, 5 baubles, and 2 pieces of gold tinsel! Dan, in the meantime, took out 2 Father Christmasses and an entire family whilst swinging round with an 8 foot tree in his shopping trolly!!! It was THE WORST weather in the world. Freezing, raining, and so windy that I ended up looking like I'd been dragged through a hedge backwards! So, tree safely in Dan's car, and Grace, Harry and I safely in mine, off we trotted to Frankie and Benny's at Junction 27 retail park. We started off with some nice garlic bread (and some with cheese, which we mostly all thought was nice) and then we had....

• Gracie - Margherita pizza
• Harry - A BIG lasagne
• Liza - chicken salad (and chips)
• Dan - calzone

As you can see from the picture, we finished ALLLLLLLL of it. We were so full at the end that we couldn't even think about a pud!
When we got back here, we started with the tree in its stocking, putting some cobble stones into the barrel base to keep it upright. Then we filled the gaps with little stones. This provides a very very solid base for the tree. One false start though - we were concentrating too hard on the stones and the tree started leaning at a funny angle! Not a problem, we took the stones out and started again, and this time the tree was more or less upright!!!!
We first put up the 3 new sets of lights. Fab, muticoloured ones. I bought them because the old set was really dying. Or so we thought......when Dan and Harry went into the loft to get down the ornaments, 2 new sets of lights were in there!!! I'd forgotten that we bought them last year. So all in all there were 326 (coloured) lights - one set a flashy flashy one! And one set of white ones (120) which will go into the lounge. Very nice. And slightly forgetful. Ooops!
After that it was a matter of minutes before all the baubles were up - with some query as to the tastefulness of each ornament as it went up on the tree. Some were discarded in bad taste! Others deemed to be so bad, they were good, in a kitsch way.
So now, we're sitting here admiring our hard work, and putting the photos up onto the web - link ---> here if you want to see more.