Jingle Bell Jingle Bell Jingle Bell Rock!
YAY! It's Christmas!
For years my family has had a fake Christmas Tree. It's beautiful, really, and it is very tidy and you can put it up without tracking pine needles and mud into the house. But there is something that I missed about those old fashioned pine and sap trees. I remember coming home from Brooklyn and the house smelling of pine, needles in the carpet, and burning the scraps of the tree in the fireplace. My parents then decided that a fake tree is more economical in the long run, and a lot less messy. And rightly so. But now that I'm on my own, with a husband and two cats (!!), we decided to go out, get cheap ornaments and a cheap stand, and find ourselves a real pine and sap tree.
It was Sunday and we left home around 2:30 to run some errands. We'd decided to find a tree, so where do we head? First to Lowe's. No trees. No stands. Hmm. Okay, we'll head across the way to Chase Pitkin. We get there, and there were just a few stragglers left. We were looking for a smaller tree, and the trees they had left were suitable for burning and that's about it. Getting nervous, we resisted the Charlie Brown Christmas urge and instead drove to Blessed Sacrament, a church right around the corner from where we live. A wonderful selection, a fundraiser for the church, and two very nice and helpful volunteers manning the trees. 10 minutes and $30 later, we had ourselves a pretty damned good lookin' tree, with only one mildly thin patch that is easily concealed against the wall. It was cold, which helped, but no snow, which would have made things even better.
We bought it, bid the tree-stewards a fond farewell. We set it up and did a relatively good decorating job during which I learned the Boyer Method for Stringing Lights on a Tree. And so we have our very first Christmas tree. And I'm happy to have it.
On an entirely different and much more disturbing note, never read stories of abandoned insane asylums while a coworker is microwaving bacon.
