I didn't even care that he gave me the old song and dance about not being able to manage my money properly and yaddy yaddy yawn. I took that ten dollars and struck out to the dollar store and picked up a few essentials for my Big Idea.

Once the kids were in bed and finally sound asleep, I began building Christmas, Sweet-style. I pulled out the box of old Christmas decorations that my sister had sent to me through the post last summer and tossed them on the floor so that I could take an inventory of just what I had to work with. "Not too much," I was thinking. What the hell was I going to do with a bunch of glittering strings, tree balls and a whole army of knotted tree lights? Well, a few of those strings of glitter were the color green. Then there were a few red ones, a good silver one, and a blue one, too. Over in the corner was an old plant pot that I could use somehow. I bought a whole slew of tape so I could use some and not have to worry about not having enough to wrap the presents. So off to work I went.

I used the green glitter string to make the outline of a tree on the living room wall. I taped it there with so much tape that not even King Kong could pull it down. I then proceeded to tape up the Christmas lights inside the outline in zigzags; they ran all the way down to the bottom of my "tree". After I did that I wound the rest of the glitter strings into the light strings and it was beginning to look a lot like Christmas in this new place of mine. When I got all that done I dug into some plastic bags that were in the box and pulled out some Christmas balls. Some were smashed into unrecognizable dust so I tossed them aside with a flick of my wrist. "Out of sight, out of mind," I always say.