Our original travel plans included being safely located at a tropical beach location well before winter even began to set in. For various reasons though, we ended up postponing those beach plans and now find ourselves in the mountains of northern Utah completely unprepared for cold. Part of the great purge last spring included most of my winter clothes, so even though we did get to our storage unit before coming here to Utah and were able to grab a few things, some things just were not even available. Like a winter coat or even a warmish jacket. I was happy to find in my lone box of saved clothing a pair of tights that only had one small hole in the foot. The weather has not yet reached terrific winter lows here and the snow has been sparse, but even so we have had to purchase a few things to make it through these couple months. Which is why thrift stores make me so happy. If I am going to wear this winter coat for approximately 4-6 weeks, I appreciate that it only cost me $10. Appropriate winter footwear though is a different matter, not so much because I am squeamish about wearing used shoes, but because size elevens are hard to find anywhere but especially at a thrift store.
In addition to a lack of winter clothes, we realized that we were not prepared to decorate for Christmas. In that same trip to our storage unit in which I gratefully retrieved a pair of tights, we did manage to grab the Christmas stockings, but the rest of our decorations remain stowed away in boxes in a storage unit in Colorado, or, in the case of our 7 foot tall pre-lit Christmas tree, lost to the purge along with my winter wardrobe. Thanksgiving weekend came and went. The college kids came 'home' and consumed copious amounts of an improvised turkey dinner with us. But, for the first time since we moved our Christmas decorating to Thanksgiving weekend, we did not hang stockings or garlands, put a wreath on our door or erect a tree and hang all our favorite ornaments on it. Something had to be done. So, while my friends in Colorado were posting Facebook pictures of their families braving the cold to hunt and cut down a tree in the wilderness, we went Christmas tree hunting too, at a local thrift store.
At the front of the store, behind a row of precariously balanced, donated bikes, was a stack of 'trees,' most still in boxes, many of the boxes sporting copious layers of packing tape representing years of being un-boxed and re-boxed year after year. Erin, Kris, and I began the process of going through boxes, aided, in some cases, by the box knife we found abandoned on the dusty window sill behind the stacked trees. Many were incomplete, but we still managed to assemble at least three and drag them over to a nearby outlet. Not a one of them had working lights. But a store employee quoted us a price of just $10 on one of the trees, so we took it, faulty lights and all. Sadly I took no pictures to post on Facebook and impress my friends with our own tree hunting process, one which involved us knocking over parts of the bike display about a half dozen times.
