Christmas Junk in my Trunk

My blog post title sounds like I'm going to talk about the effects of eating holiday goodies. Actually that would be a good topic for a post...but this is about something else. The other day I spotted a Christmas tree in the back of someone's pick-up. Then last night, I saw someone hauling a tree on the roof of their car.

I like catching people in the act of taking their trees home. I'm excited for them. Hey, look what they got!  Gonna be putting up the tree tonight!  I like that it's such a break from routine --people don't normally drive around with whole trees inside their car. And you know, it's not such an easy thing to do, when you're trying to transport a 7 foot fir by way of a compact sedan. I think a surreal experiment would be to stake out the road near Home Depot and see what methods people come up with for getting their tree home.

This year we have Roger's hatchback, but I have driven a tree home myself on more than one occasion, when I had the old Corolla. I never felt like I knew how to strap a tree to my roof. I always had to stuff it into the trunk. But the trunk was never big enough and the tree would stick halfway out the trunk, so I'd try to tie the trunk down with some kind of twine, and hope to god the trunk and the tree would stay put. But I never felt secure about the whole set-up---the tree sticking out, the trunk partially secured with my half-ass twine and weak knots. So I would give myself false assurance by saying, "Well, it didn't fall out last year!" And I'd get the kids in the car and keep my fingers crossed the whole way home.