O' Spider Tree

Anyone know the difference between these two trees?  One is real and one is fake? Yes.  One looks kind of like a hot mess and the other a bit more organized?  Yes.  One is strung with lights and the other is prelit?  Also true.   Now the biggest difference that is missing is one has spiders and the other does not!

Last year was the first time Derek and I got a Christmas tree.  Prior to last Christmas, we always lived in an apartment and were spending the holidays at our parents' houses so it never made sense to have one.  With it being our first Christmas in our first house, we just had to get a tree.  We picked up the gem on the left at Home Depot.  I had wanted to go to a tree farm to cut one of our own but they don't grow frasier firs in Texas.  That was the only kind of tree I wanted so we would just have to settle for one that was trucked in from North Carolina.

We thought the tree was great (although after looking back at the pictures it looks kind of pathetic) until we returned home from spending Christmas with our families.  We had placed white trash bags all around the bottom of the tree to prevent any sap from going on the wood floors but these trash bags caught far more than sap.  They caught hundreds of tiny spiders.

Apparently there was a spider's egg that we got at no extra charge with our Christmas tree.  Being in the warm house, the egg burst open spilling all the little pests out.  I guess I have to say that we were fortunate in that the egg burst before all the spiders were grown enough to survive on their own.  They were mostly laying on their back squirming their nasty spider legs and thankfully not scurrying all over my house.  What an awful infestation that would have been!

My friend, Katie, arrived home with us and I think within ten minutes she and I had completely undecorated the tree and dragged it into the back yard.  We swept and vacuumed up all the spiders we couldn't wrap up in the trash bags and then ran to the showers.  Whether we got any bugs on us or not we couldn't erase the images and had to make sure we washed off any remaining spiders.

That day, I swore I was done with real Christmas trees.  Once the trees came out in stores (which I believe was right after Halloween for goodness sake) we began hunting for the perfect fake tree.  We settled on the one on the right and I couldn't be happier.  No sap, no stringing lights, no watering, no needles, and NO SPIDERS!