How to Kill a Christmas tree

It is two days before Christmas and we have just had to throw out our tree. Total festive nightmare! Here I am preaching the spirit of the season it being my son's first Christmas and as far as I know we are the only house that has thrown out their tree before Christmas day!

We managed to kill the tree within the space of 5 days. That is pretty impressive, even by our standards. We all clung on hoping that it wasn't really dead, living in denial as the branches became brittle and that wonderful real Christmas tree smell permeating the apartment dissipated and turned into the stench of death instead. We bought the tree three weeks ago, lovingly decorated it, christmas carols and songs in the background, mince pies in the oven and finally gated it off to protect it from our four legged animals and our two legged animal son. We were so proud of ourselves, it was a beauty. Seriously. 

Then we didn't water it for 5 days.

We just forgot. It was too late. It was dead. 

But we weren't done there. A friend informed us that every year her family put a potato in with the water for the tree which enables nutrients to pass into the tree. She suggested that it may help our situation. We didn't stop to question the science or the practicalities. We were desperate. In the potato went. 

Soon the stench of christmas tree death turned into something more repulsive. For 2 days my husband and I were wandering around asking each other what the smell was? Had the baby vomited? Had my husband? Was it the dogs? What WAS that smell???? It took us 2 days to figure out that the potatoes were rotting in the water at the foot of the dead Christmas tree.

So we enlisted help of our maintenance men to remove the tree. Luckily they weren't inundated with requests to throw trees out just yet given it's the week before Christmas so they were available. They brought their plastic wrap and went about extracting the once vibrant, magnificent specimen of a tree. When it came to removing the tree from the water base and revealing the rotting potato water it was pretty uncomfortable for everyone. The maintenance men because they were trying not to be sick and us because the maintenance men now think we are total imbeciles for throwing potatoes into Christmas tree water.

The good news is that the tree is gone and we've had a period of 24 hours to detox the apartment of the terrible smells. The bad news for my husband is he's got to go and shell out for another tree, get it back into the apartment and decorate it all over again. Poor guy. But Christmas without a tree is pretty much like canceling Christmas totally so it has to be done.

Please learn from my mistakes, water your tree (they suck it up!!), don't cling on if you know it's dead (it's a fire hazard another friend pointed out) and whatever you do DON'T put potatoes in the water!

Failing all of that buy an artificial one!