Stella's Story and Jo's Story

Merry Christmas, its me, Stella!  Last week Alison Strumbo who is also Brandon's Raiser, sent me a letter about I won her contest!  That I should send her my address and she would have Hartz Mountain send me my ANGRY BIRDS toys that I won.  I don't think I have ever won anything before, but these toys came TODAY!  Here is me snoofing the box, I can always tell if its toys for me because of the scent of them, they smell so good.

So here I am trying to open this box up and I finally did it, and look what was inside!

Three Angry Birds and a Funny Pig!  They all have good squeakers too which is one of my favorite stuffee features.  So a big thank you to Alison for having the contest and thank you to Hartz Mountain for these cool but angry birds!  This is like a very special Christmas present, don't you think?  So now Mom has one of her old stories to tell about a Christmas tree . . .take it away, Mom, and give me my birds, please.

Jo here, now I may have told you this before but its Christmas and once more can't hurt. This takes place in Minnesota when the temps toward the middle of December were often sub-zero.  When I was a kid, about 65  years ago, my Mom  used to send my Dad and I out to buy a tree.  The lot was just a couple of blocks from our house, and it was full of trees that were stacked standing up against a building, about twenty trees in each stack, pushed flat.  So my Dad would start going through them, one at a time, and he would say, "Jo, what do you think of this one?"  I would shake my head and say too flat, too flat.  He would continue to pull them out and look, same answer from me, no, not that one, too flat!  His patience was endless but even he got tired of my rejecting his trees.  He'd say, "Here is a perfect one, I'm getting this!"
He would reach into his pocket and pull out 50 cents to pay for it!
I would almost cry, I felt so terrible to be bringing this flat tree home.  My mother had the stand set up, we'd put the silly looking thing in it with some water, and go to bed.  The magic happened overnight of course, we would wake up to a perfectly beautiful tree, all branched out, no flat to it, and ready to be decorated.  I still don't know if he really knew what he was getting or if he just got tired of looking.  But the tree was always a thing of beauty, and it smelled so good!

Merry Christmas everybuddy,
Jo, Stella and Zkhat