This beautiful 12' tree pictured above was given to us this year. One of our volunteers assisted a Sister in assembling it. It was known (though not widely), that the bottom of the pole was "somewhat" bent, but it assembled well and looked really terrific -- and most importantly, stood erect!
A few days later, one of us began to decorate the tree by putting the star on the top, with the necessity of tilting the top slightly in order to reach it from the 10' ladder. All went well until Sister was down ladder and moved it to a better location to begin decorating. You guessed it, the tree began to fall...
Three of us and two of our strong-armed male volunteers then began the nearly hour long task of making the tree stand erect on its own. When shoring up the base didn't help, we switched the tree to a different style holder, and adding stronger shoring up material, i.e. rocks. When that didn't work, the engineering mind said we needed to wire it. Thankfully, the recessed area in the ceiling had four screws placed in the architecture that were in the exact places needed to attach the wires, and now our tree is standing wonderfully erect!
And as you probably have already guessed, our minds are already thinking of what needs done to make this task to erecting and decorating this particular tree easier next year...
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