↓ FROM THE EDITORRYAN D’AGOSTI NO
Editor in Chief
@rhdagostino6 March 2019 _ PopularMechanics.com
Y
OU’RE PROBABLY READING this in February. Everyone can stop saying Happy
New Year now. But I just took our Christmas tree down recently. We left it up
longer than usual this year, because we didn’t get it until almost Christmas
Eve, because—
Well, I’ll tell you.
We’d had to have some work done on the house, which required that we move
out for a few months. Three weeks before Christmas, our contractor said we
probably couldn’t move back in until late January.
We begged. It would mean a lot to be able to spend the holidays at home, we told him. And
our kids wanted to have a party at the “new” old house—before Christmas, we told him.
He shrugged and said he would try.
He sent a swarm of guys seven days a week after that. His own wife showed up to paint.
The house came back together, and in the end, the contractor—a gifted craftsman, builder,
and thinker, and a hell of a guy—pulled it off. On December 21, the rainiest day of the year,
we moved back in. The party would be the 23rd.
At 4:45 p.m. on the 22nd, we realized we didn’t have
a Christmas tree.
I called our friend Andy, which we often do in quasi-
emergencies. He and I started calling around to places.
The farm stand up the street was all out of trees. So was the
other farm stand up the other street. Then Andy texted
that he had reached a nursery 15 minutes away, and they
had a few trees left. We jumped in the minivan.
At 5:10 we found a padlocked gate and a largely dark-
ened building in the distance.
“No way,” my wife said. She got out and, much to the
delight of our two boys, started scaling the fence.
A police car pulled in behind us. My wife had one leg
over the fence. I put my hands up and told the officer, whom I could barely see through his
police light, about the house and the tree and the phone call and that my wife was just going
to see if anyone was still—
“It’s okay,” he said. “Someone escaped from the psychiatric hospital, and I thought you
might be looking for them, too.”
Huh. Not what I expected. No no, I told him, just trying to get a tree, in the dark, three
days before Christmas.
“Happy holidays,” he said.
Sarah kept going and reappeared five minutes later with a woman who smiled and opened
the gate. We drove in. They only had about four trees left, so it didn’t take long to choose one.
(In a normal year, this is a long and deliberative process for me.) They had an old chainsaw
for lopping off the bottoms. I tried to start it, but the saw was finicky, and it was pitch black,
so I bailed on that and we threw the tree on the roof of the minivan.
The woman gave us a few bucks off and locked the gate behind us. She said she hoped we
had a merry Christmas.
We d id.We Got a Tree
WHAT WE’RE READING
We’re always pulling for
innovative people. So the ABC
show Shark Tank—which fea-
tures entrepreneurs pitching
to a panel of investors—is
one of our favorites. To
celebrate the show’s tenth
season, Hearst Magazines
partnered with Sony Pictures
Television to create a special-
issue magazine, Inside the
Shark Tank. We spoke with
the lead Sharks about their
own businesses, their favor-
ite pitches, and what makes
a company a long-term suc-
cess. Hard copies are on select
newsstands until February 25;
aprint-on-demand version is
also available on Amazon.
“NO WAY,” MY WIFE
SAID. SHE GOT
OUT AND, MUCH
TO THE DELIGHT
OF OUR TWO BOYS,
STARTED SCALING
THE FENCE.