November 30, 2015

The Hunt for the Perfect Christmas Tree

Martie Big Creek Farmhouse Remodel artificial tree, Big Creek, cedar tree, Charlie Brown tree, cut tree, live tree, the perfect Christmas tree 4 Comments

The Hunt for the Perfect Christmas Tree

I would like to invite you this morning to go with us on the hunt for the perfect Christmas Tree! I just hope you don’t mind unsuccessful hunting trips.

We have a big, beautiful, artificial Christmas tree.  We’ve had it for about 11 years, and we bought it when we had a really small house.  My dream of a full, lush Christmas tree glowing in my cozy home turned out more like a huge nuisance, obstructing entryways and blocking the TV in my cracker-box living room.  I didn’t care.  I wanted that giant tree, and it was on sale!

We then moved to our second home, and that tree was absolutely perfect there!  With our cathedral ceilings (which I don’t miss one bit), that tree looked normal, and pretty much how I imagined it would.  Our preposterous tree was made for that house!  We only had to move a small amount of furniture to nestle it right in where we wanted it, and we could move through our living quarters with ease the entire Christmas season! It was the perfect Christmas tree for the space we had.

Then, we moved here, to Big Creek.  I did put the giant tree up last year, right as we moved in.

See, we moved in on the day before Thanksgiving, finishing up all the big stuff on the day after (we’ve celebrated our one-year anniversary here!).  I put up the tree that very weekend, a year ago, and decided if we just started out with the tree, then we wouldn’t have to move anything or rearrange our lives for it.  This house is probably bigger than our last, square-footage-wise, but the rooms are smaller (since there are more of them), the ceilings are much lower, and it was already almost full of furniture and “stuff” when we moved in.  The tree, once again, looked like the attack of Clark W. Griswold.

We almost had somewhere to sit on Christmas morning!

Why buy a tree?

Y’all know how much we’ve done to this house in the last year!  We’ve snuck things out that didn’t belong to us, moved things around until they suited us, and worked really hard on having major construction issues addressed and remedied.  We’ve made our nest here, and it’s just the coziest little place this side of the nuthouse!  I started thinking about putting up our Christmas tree, and I realized that the monster tree just wasn’t going to cut it anymore.  I don’t want to move mountains to bring it in, and leave us with less seating and obstructed throughways.  Our poor rabbit might starve to death if the girls have to walk all the way around to feed her, God forbid!

I made the executive decision that we would walk the property and find the perfect, small Cedar tree to harvest for our Christmas tree!  I would hate to buy a new tree, and it’s been years since we’ve gotten to enjoy the fragrance of a cut tree at Christmas time! Plus, if we go small, we will only have to move one end table to fit it into the same corner that our Christmas tree was always in when I was a kid.  How nostalgic!

The hunt for the perfect tree begins

We set out on Saturday afternoon, I in my shorts, t-shirt and flip-flops (because it’s the Deep South, y’all), and we began our hunt. We hadn’t gone far at all, when I saw it…the perfect Christmas tree!  

Do you see Madre’s dog, Lucy, there at the foot of it?  That little black dot? Yeah, she’s like 3 feet tall.  Coach had to talk me down, and I walked away, finally, mumbling that it was just a little full, had lot of sap, and that I like big trees and I cannot lie!  Realizing that the whole purpose of our mission was to scale down, I had to let it go.

We walked and walked and walked, and all we saw on the first leg of our journey was lots and lots of privet hedge.  I kept spotting green, and we would inspect closer only to find more privet hedge.  I didn’t photograph any of it, because, why?  I can see it in my dreams. That stuff is everywhere!  I even briefly considered a privet hedge Christmas tree, but Coach wouldn’t hear of it.

After that, we climbed the big hill behind the house, because we could see some small cedar trees along the fence row of the horse pasture.  Although the views were absolutely breathtaking,

all the cedar trees were crazily misshapen.  They either had another tree growing way too close, causing one side to be practically bare, or were so out-of-control that they made our giant falsie tree seem more appealing.  We lumbered back down the hill, I with my scratches and the girls with their blisters, and decided we’d have to abandon our mission for the day.

Yesterday afternoon, Coach and I drove up on the very top of Madre’s property and hunted again.  It was drizzling rain, and the mud up there would’ve made for some fun 4-wheeling, but this was the best thing we found.  I wanted to scale down, but I didn’t really want a Charlie Brown tree, ya know?

So, I’m off to town this morning, to TSC, to spend $29.99 on the perfect cut tree that will fit in my corner.  We can totally pretend that we cut our Spruce, or whatever they are, on our own farm, even though it probably isn’t indigenous to the area.  Coach and I decided that Christmas trees that are actually grown to be Christmas trees are pruned, shaped, and nurtured to look like they’re supposed to.  Trees growing in the wild just don’t have that luxury!  And, if I’m going to have to make a sacrifice of putting up a smaller tree, it’s at least going to be shaped right!  I can’t go decorating for Jesus’s birthday with a wackadoodle tree…it just wouldn’t be fittin’.

What’s your favorite kind of Christmas tree?  Do you use artificial, pre-lit, cut, or live?  We had a live tree here at Big Creek in 1987, and she’s still a beaut, Clark…right here in the front yard!

I have enjoyed our artificial monster-tree, but we always had either a cut or live tree here at Big Creek when I was growing up, so I can’t wait to have that fragrance in the house again this year!  I may regret it when it gets needle-vacuuming time….

X,O,X,O,    Martie