Merry Christmas! Everything on the blog this week has been Christmas-themed, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. 😉 And as a final post before the holidays, I thought I’d just tell you about our little adventure…
See, in my family, we get a live tree. If possible, a blue spruce. This has been our tradition since my husband and I got married 17 years ago. And in general, it’s played out the same every year: usually my hubby and his mother go out to fetch one, sometimes taking the kids along to help with the selection. Most of the time, they’ve just nabbed one from a lot in town.
Now, for the last 17 years, we’ve done this pretty much the same week–namely, two weeks before Christmas. Because let me just tell you, if you get a live tree from a lot any earlier than that, you’re not going to have any needles left for Christmas. 😉 After a frustrating experience with a tree that lost half its needles during the decorating process, two years ago, I gently *ahem* hinted that they should go to a tree farm next time. The next year, yeah, um…they just came home with a tree one day from the same lot we always use. So, you know, whatever. 😉
This year I was about to start dropping the tree-farm hints again…and didn’t have to. Because this year there were NO TREES to be found in our hometown! None of the lots had more than one scraggly example. Usually, you can still find them on Christmas Eve–this year, they were all gone by the first week in December!
So we started looking around at the many tree farms in the area…only to find that some had closed, some had never opened for this season thanks to no stock the right size, and others had sold out the weekend after Thanksgiving. Say what?
We thought we were going to have to drive an hour to find one–never mind a blue spruce in particular, we’d have settled for anything! Then my parents found a tree farm in the yellow pages Saturday night and gave them a ring (they also wanted a live tree). The woman assured them they had “little but blue spruces, actually” and told us how to get there: out Knobley Rd, cross over 50, then it’s just two miles beyond that.
Well, on Sunday we followed those directions, and we found a tree farm…by a different name than the one in the yellow pages. Who had a few blue spruces, though certainly not many. We asked them if they were the same as the one in the phone book, and they’d never heard of it. Asked about the phone number…same story. No one in their family.
So while I have no idea where that tree farm is, LOL, we did indeed find one, and we found two beauties. Better still, they’re half the price of the ones on the lots. Sounds like a new family tradition to me!
This year our experiment will be adding some Miracle Grow to the water and seeing if it helps keep the tree vibrant–someone on a radio program my husband listens too reported that they added a ton to their freshly-cut tree’s water and it was actually growing roots by the time they took it down, so they planted it! Our kids think that sounds awesome. If we can pull it off, we’re going to name it Bruce the Blue Spruce and put lights on it every year outside. 😉
So my house finally looks–and smells–like Christmas. (All our decorations are stored with the tree decorations, so we do it all at once.) It hadn’t really felt so near Christmas before, but hopefully now it’ll begin to!
This is my last post until New Year’s Eve, so from my family to yours, have a very Merry Christmas! May the
Joy of Christ fill your hearts and homes this week and throughout the year. If you have any special plans–or just simple traditions you treasure that you’re looking forward to–I’d love to hear about them!
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.
That is a beautiful tree. Nice and bushy and round! You got a winner. We only did half of our little artificial tree this year. But it is decorated with white lights and angels.
Great tree! I enjoyed reading your story. Merry Christmas to you and your family, too!