O Tannenbaum!

Christmas trees can be as varied as people - tall, short, round, elegant, and sometimes just sad. 

At our house we’ve proved that Charlie Brown doesn’t have a monopoly on quirky.

     We always bought live trees and we acquired them from all sorts of places over the years. We did occasionally go to an actual lot, but when the kids were little we often cut our own. This produced mixed results. 

     There was the year we drove all the way out (really only 25 minutes) from the city where we lived to the town of my in-laws (where we now live) and went to a Christmas tree farm. We tramped around from tree to tree, one of the kids dragging the cross-buck hand saw. One tree would look good, then another, until we finally found one we all liked. My husband lay on the ground and sawed away and the tree was ours.

     After it sat in the garage for a couple of days we hauled it in and wrestled it into the tree stand and stood back. It was barely taller than our children.

     The farmer had planted his trees like any other crop, in raised furrows, so that the tree had looked at least a foot taller out in the field. 

     Another year we drove even farther to a picturesque farm on a hillside where the trees enjoyed a stunning view of the small valley below as they grew. Here the procedure was a bit different. You could swing by at your leisure, choose your tree, affix the tag they provided, and then return to cut it down at a later date.

      However, word was out that in previous years there had been nefarious and distinctly un-Christmassy incidents. Some people who had been unable to find a tree to their liking had actually surreptitiously switched the tags. 

     We decided we’d fix their wagon. 

    We tied an infinite number of ribbons all over our tree of choice until it looked like the hair-ragged skull of Little House on the Prairie’s Nellie Oleson. While we did foil the tag switchers, we did have to unknot all those tightly tied ribbons before we could decorate. 

     A few years later we moved out of the city. That year I was transported by the magic of small town living, and bought our Thanksgiving turkey from the farm on Main Street. When I needed milk on my way home from work I would bypass the quick-stop places and instead patronize the small store in the middle of town.   
     So when the Lions’ Club set up their annual Christmas tree lot in Gazebo Park, even though it had been there since shortly after Thanksgiving, I couldn’t resist the idea of buying a tree right on Main Street . 

     We chose one, a real beauty, and put it in the garage where we would saw off a fresh section of the trunk when we were ready to bring it in. The big day came and we dragged it into the house. We weren’t too far into the light stringing before we realized the tree had been a message center for every cat in town. The heady aroma (and not of pine) finally did fade, but the tree had a tendency to list and I’d start every day by checking the living room to see if it was still upright.

          In the later years of our careers, my husband was usually on a plane or in some other city, while teaching filled much of my day. As a result, on more than one occasion I would be stopping at the nearest stand by myself, slowing down only long enough to grab the first one I saw. 

       So we did the unthinkable. We bought a fake tree.

          This year we pulled it out of the shed again, put it up in the living room and noticed little clumps of fibers and leaves in the branches. Not only that, but it had a distinctly gamey odor. 
  

   Apparently the shed mice, who have already completely destroyed my husband’s baseball mitt collection and several flags, had been cozying up in our tree. A typhoon of Febreze pretty much solved the problem, but I’m beginning to view those cold aluminum trees of the 50s in a whole new light.