Getting into the Festive Spirit

I finally got my Christmas tree last night. My fiance, after protesting that I had to get a smaller tree than the one he had to carry up the stairs last year, agreed to help me. This year's tree, of course, is a full foot taller and about three feet wider than last year's. The good news for my fiance: it's just barely touching the ceiling, so next year's won't be any taller -- unless I'm living somewhere else.

As we wandered around the Christmas tree lot, my fiance hopefully lingering among the seven-foot-tall trees while I carefully inspected the eight- and nine-footers, I fondly recalled the day we got our very first Christmas tree. Because I am an electronic pack rat and can manage to dig up such things, here's how I told the story in an email to my Mom way back then...

So my (then-)boyfriend (now fiance) has this brilliant idea that we're going to cut down a Christmas tree. He doesn't want to buy one from a Christmas tree lot, because he says they don't stay fresh and they get dried out too quickly because it's too warm here for Yankee fir trees. Since it's supposed to be 70 degrees today, I suppose he has a point. (No such problem this year; the Yankee fir trees are feeling right at home. It's the Yankee woman who's doing all the complaining -- I moved here to get away from weather like this.)

So, on Saturday, we drive around out in the country (which starts about ten minutes outside of the town where he lives) for about an hour and a half looking for a Christmas tree. In honor of the occasion, my boyfriend's wearing his red plaid flannel lumberjack shirt. He said that he had found several Christmas trees -- cedar, not fir -- on empty lots over the years. Apparently people have gotten wise to this tactic, because all of the really nice cedar trees that we see are on the wrong sides of barbed wire fences. Including all of the ones on the "cut-your-own" Christmas tree farm, which we decide will be our last resort.

My boyfriend has one more idea before that: his company owns the huge, partially-wooded lot behind his office. It's only partially-wooded because most of the middle of it is a swamp. But it's too cold for snakes, so we trudge through the muck looking for the perfect Christmas tree. And it's there, with one small problem: it's about sixteen feet tall. I, of course, am determined to have this tree, or at least as much of it as we can fit into the house. My boyfriend, of course, thinks I'm out of my mind, and has no intention of cutting down a sixteen foot tall tree and lugging it through the center of town.

Half an hour later, he's dragging the top twelve feet or so of the perfect Christmas tree through the swamp and up the hill to the parking lot. He looks like a pissed-off lumberjack, I look like the cat that ate the canary, and the tree ends up sticking out three feet off the end of the pick-up truck as we drive through town.

I got my five boxes of Christmas stuff and the tree stand out of storage on Sunday, and we set up the tree (minus about another three feet off the bottom) that night. The tree is huge; it's about eight or nine feet tall and looks like it's almost that wide. We trimmed the "back" branches short so that we could put it closer to the wall, but that made it front-heavy, so we weighted the bottom down with bricks and tied it off to the wall so it wouldn't fall over. So far, so good. The only thing that didn't work was my angel; the top of the tree isn't strong enough to hold it up, so we put a bow up there instead.

So far, that tree is my favorite of all the ones I've ever had.