The tree slayers, victorious!
We jam our weekends full. It seems we aren’t happy about having something scheduled for Saturday so instead we pile a whole lot of somethings into the weekend and the result is a two day whirlwind that always leaves me doubled over and panting to catch my breath on Sunday night and looking forward to having a nice quiet Monday at work.
This weekend included Christmas shopping and a few hours of work at the Cremona Winter Festival and grocery shopping and a visit from in-laws and attending Church on the first day of Advent and cutting the Christmas tree and fun hockey and setting up the Christmas tree. In no particular order. See? Full.
And here I am, catching my breath once again. Man it will be nice to get back into the office.
Story of the weekend? Likely it has to be the Christmas tree. We cut our own tree each year and we do it here at camp. Now we have beautiful evergreens here but they are white spruce and while white spruce grow tall and majestic they don’t tend to grow thick. They are, in fact, the least Christmas-tree-like of all the evergreens and tend to grow long trunks with the green starting about 3/4 of the way up and then kind of tufting out like Zeus’s trufulas. Add the fact that it’s an old growth forest and most of the trees top 60 feet and the little ones starve for sun and you get these tall, gangly things that stretch for light and don’t put branches anywhere they won’t convert sunlight into precious energy.
And that is a long way of excusing the fact that our Christmas trees tend to be kind of awful.
In years past we would spend a few glorious September days wandering around and picking out potential trees and even farming trees for the future (cutting down the little ones to thin the competition). Before you go thinking that I hate nature, know that the forest is constantly pushing on it’s boundaries and if we didn’t cut these things it wouldn’t be too long before we were playing field games in something that once was a field but is now full of trees. Anyway we used to find the trees that we liked best and flag them for future reference but this was all in the halcyon days when we had this little thing called “lots of free time” and not in the postakidalyptic days that we find ourselves in now where the level of daily intensity teeters along a line between “We’re busy, but it’s a good busy” and “I SAID I’LL DO IT IN A MINUTE” and taking the time to wander around looking for Christmas trees seems to be… less of a priority.
So anyway we end up trudging through snow. For days. So we can look at every tree God saw fit to put in this little patch of creation only to pick the very first one we looked at and cut it down and drag it home. Then we trim the thing to size and set it up and Nikki berates it thoroughly and then we put lights and angels and bells and balls on and declare it beautiful. Charlie Brown has taught us well.
Anyway we have a Christmas tree now. Not as pathetic as last year’s (which Nik cruelly deemed “the worst one yet”) and not as good as some other years. Just quietly lit up and giving a warm glow to the room. It is a nice thing to sit beside while I catch my breath.
thewoodsthroughthetrees 