What goes up, must come down

Our big project for the long holiday weekend was, like most of the rest of the population, to put up our holiday decorations. (I will be sharing photos of our hard work soon, but this story must be posted first.)

This year, we put up two Christmas trees, yippee! We were fortunate to inherit a hand-me-down tree the year previous last and scored some major deals on ornaments after Christmas last year. So in addition to our white and silver adorned tree in the front of the house, we frosted our old one with red and gold in the family room. Justin and I finished putting up the second tree Saturday afternoon while getting in the holiday spirit watching The Holiday (one of my favorite movies).

The cats always get rowdy when we break out the decor and generally make it up the tree a few times each holiday season, but unbeknownst to us, the extra weight they gained last year would be the downfall to our already-on-the-brink-of-a-Charlie-Brown Christmas tree.

This is what I found when I padded downstairs Sunday morning.

At the sight of this Christmas tree murder, I literally gasped as my hands covered my mouth. All of our hard work! Here's one of the little suspects returning to the crime scene.

I didn't have the heart to count the number of bodies (ornaments), but if I had to guess I would say at least 15 lost their lives and the star was seriously injured.

After Justin and I cleaned up the mess and patched our tree back up, we anchored the base with extra paver bricks left over from our patio install last summer. That should hold the tree up, but hopefully they don't bend it or break off the top half like my mom's cats did a couple years ago, though it does make for a nice cat stand. Fingers crossed that the bandits don't hit again.