Festive Decorations

Today we decorated for Christmas. Seeing as how it's the first Sunday of Advent, I don't think we're jumping the gun too much, though a little bit of me rebels at having decorations up prior to the official start of December. But, we were both in the mood for it, so we decided to go ahead and do it now rather than waiting and have it end up a chore.

The past couple years we've gone round and round on the tree debate. For the first sixish years we were married we had a fake tree (the same one all 6 years) that looked more like a complicated set of pipe cleaners each successive year. So 4 years ago, we tossed it out and began the annual discussion of "fresh dead tree" vs. "plantable fresh tree" vs. "new fake tree". Once we went with the plantable fresh tree - and that tree is flourishing in our yard to this day. It's neat to see it and remember that it was a Christmas tree. And it's nice to go that way because, well, you're not just tossing your money into a pit all for the sake of holiday cheer. Because where we live, the fresh dead trees are really expensive. Like close to $100 expensive. We've paid it twice. Choking each time. But this year...this year, we found Lowes. At Lowes, we got a nicer looking tree than our garden store expensive trees (that you feel like you ought to be able to keep for posterity, cause our plantable tree - it was only $60), for only $25. Much better. Still not as good as when I was a kid though.

Not to digress into the "back in my day" discussion, but seriously - getting a tree when I was little was one of the highlights of the year. On Thanksgiving day (sometimes the day after), we would pull on our boots and snow suits and jackets and gloves and hats and venture forth into the snow. (There was almost always snow.) We would truck up the mountain - either to forest areas that the county had marked as available for tree cutting with permit or up to our property. And then, we would hike around looking for just the right tree.

Before you get the picture of the perfectly shaped tree in your mind, the right tree for us was never that tree. For us, the right tree was always one that also met criteria of good forestry - so it was usually a sucker tree (one that has sprouted out of the base of another tree and, if left alone, will more than likely cause both to die.) Invariably, our tree had one really pretty side, and one side that faced the corner. The corner side sometimes had branches, but not often. But you know what? It didn't matter.

My sister and I would grab the hack saw from daddy and work together to try and cut down our tree. We would saw and saw and saw and saw...and saw. And after probably a half an hour, when we were cold, wet and exhausted, we would have made about an inch deep cut through the tree trunk. So daddy would finish it up and just before he was all the way through we would all four yell, "TIMBER!" and let the tree go crashing down. It was always so nice to see the tree in the corner of the living room and know that we picked it 'specially for this Christmas.

When we moved from the mountains, we were appalled at the prices of trees. And I know I was disappointed that there was no where to go to cut your own. For a long time, Christmas trees just didn't seem like the real thing because you just go buy them and stick them up. But today, roaming the lines of trees with Tim and having him laugh at me as I rejected this one because it was too prickly and this other because it wasn't prickly enough or because it didn't have a tall enough stick on the top for the angel to sit on or ...the myriad of reasons I found before finding our perfect douglas fir for this year, I realized that maybe, just maybe, you don't have to cut your own tree to make it a good decorating day.

But the jury's still out. Because nothing will ever beat trudging through snow with mom and dad and my sister and coming home wet and tired with a scraggly, but perfect, tree.