Happy New Year! I wish you all the best for the coming year, and hope that you had a wonderful 2010, and will have an even better 2011. I want to thank each and every one of you for stopping by this neck of the woods, I truly appreciate it. I know it's been a bit of a slow start for manusmade, but I have big plans for 2011 and I would love to have you all there with me as they come to fruition.

It seems slightly silly to be posting pictures of Christmas trees right now, a week into January. You've probably all seen your share of them this holiday season. Mind you, tomorrow is only the twelfth day of Christmas, so it's still technically the holidays! I plan to have my real tree up for as long as possible - I always miss the lights when I take it down!

I'm here today to tell you about the christmas tree of death. Or at least the very very merry painful tree. I'm not talking about the cute pipe cleaner ones, or even the cuddly fabric (linen!) embroidered one. Not even the white-as-angel-snow-peppermint tree. I'm talking about that other one - the beastly deadly gumdrop one. Just look at it, you can tell from here how nasty it is. It's like one of the those cute plants that looks ok from afar, but as soon as you get close enough, the flower turns into some man-eating snapping head and its teeth shut down on your jugular and you end up lying on the floor in a plant-induced coma just because you were dumb enough to want to smell the roses.

Yes, I put that sweet little gumdrop tree in the same genre as the man-eating roses.

I put it out on the buffet in our living room, but I give it lots of space. I give it the respect and admiration it deserves. You see, this tree gave me a blister about 1 inch big on my hand. Well, I guess it wasn't really the gumdrop tree so much as the glue gun I was wielding to attach the gumdrops to the styrofoam cone underneath. I was just sitting on the floor of my livingroom, surrounded by bags of candy and styrofoam cones (ooh! edible Christmas Madonna bustiers next year!), singing along at top volume with Wham(!) to that song that only has one or two lines of lyrics (last Christmas, I gave you my heart, and you threw it away....), and trying to keep the dog from sucking peppermints up his nose, when... AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH! I put glue on a gumdrop, it got bottom heavy, and dropped onto my hand (on the bendy part between my palm and my pinky), and STUCK there! I started at it in silent pain for about 5 seconds (which is a really long time in silent pain time), dropped the gun, unstuck myself from the gumdrop and ran to the sink to pour water on the painful area. Wrong! When you pour cold water on hot glue that is still stuck to you - it SOLIDIFIES, people, thereby making it harder to peel off. I took one big breath, peeled off the now hard glue and kept my hand under water for about 30 mintues. Ow ow ow. I then one-handedly finished the tree without further distress. My hand was fine in a few days, and the tree looks cute if I do say so myself.

But yes, I still give it a lot of respect. And I haven't used a glue gun since.