The Slice: Holiday tree falls victim to bird’s dead weight

Maybe it was a bad little tree.

“Instead of placing the Christmas tree in the window of the living room this year, my daughter decided their tree should be put in one corner of that room,” wrote Kathy Hawkins. “This prompted my 6-year-old granddaughter to tell her playmate that her mom had put their Christmas tree in ‘time out.’ ”

If we accept young Lauren’s interpretation of the tree’s placement, it raises a question. What could a Christmas tree do to merit banishment to the time-out corner? Trying to poke someone’s eye out? Taunting the cat?

Here’s another possibility.

“When his kids were little, my son in Idaho would bring them and come spend Christmas with me,” wrote Priscilla Bennin of Soap Lake, Wash. “He always cut a fresh tree and brought it with him (tied on top of the car).”

But one Christmas, about 20 years ago, getting the tree to Soap Lake proved to be the easy part.

“The tree simply would not stay up. We would securely fix it in the stand, make sure it was straight, and then decorate it. Then, a day or two later, with no apparent reason, it would suddenly fall over.

“Twice we picked it up, put everything back together and tried to fix it more securely. Finally, the third time it fell, along with scattered ornaments, a dead bird fell out of it. All the times we set up the tree and decorated it, no one noticed it.”

The bird was definitely deceased, not just pining for the fjords.

I asked Bennin what kind of bird it was. She said she didn’t know.

“I was so grossed out at the idea that it had been there almost a week without our seeing it, through all our decorating and redecorating and generally fooling around with the tree, that I just got it into the garbage quick and out the door.”

Hiding Christmas presents: “My sisters and I grew up in Wilbur, and our dad was the funeral director,” wrote Gail Johnson. “Our gifts were all hidden in the caskets in the show room and we never found them.”

Today’s Slice question: What if every kid isn’t really “amazing”?