The Knot before Christmas

I have been having a bit of writers block just of late, and not knowing what to post about. Then I read Gabriel at Invizible Kidz blog called The Christmas Inverter about people turning their Christmas Trees upside down.

That reminded me of a chap that I used to work with at the Garden Centre. I`ll call him John, it seems fair his Mother did. Now John was a fairly decent type of man, honest, hardworking, but he seemed to `Go at life` at 90° to the rest of us. 

Pic from Google 

This was never more apparent than at Christmas with the Christmas Trees, the Garden Centre we worked at did not have one of those big tube things used to put Christmas trees in nets so we had to tie them the old fastened way with strong string.

Now to tell this right, I`ll first say how it SHOULD be done!

1.    Cut off enough string, about a yard for every one foot height of tree.

2.   Lay the tree on the ground, tie one end of the string to the base (root end) of the tree.

3.    Standing over that end, with your back to the top of the tree, grip the lowest branches between your legs as tight as possible and reach under with both hands on the string to make a loop.

4.   Pull the string though and move up keeping the branches as tight as possible with your legs.

5.    Repeat as if you were tying a parcel or piece of meat,

6.   When you reach the top about 5 or 6 loops, if you`ve cut the string to about the right length tie the free end to near the top of the tree.

Simple, but not for John !!!

I showed him at least 3 times, the boss showed him 3 or 4 times as well. In the end we thought he had got-it.

One day the boss and I had to go out for more trees, when we returned we found John, on the floor, tied to a Christmas tree with a small group of customers surrounding him, trying to undo him.

I just wish I had photos