The Small Tree

As you may well remember, we were hit by the 200 year storm last March. Our lower level was flooded, and we lost a lot of items that were in storage including my son's brand new carpet (which I blogged about buying) and our artificial, 6' Christmas Tree.

Ever since November, my husband and I have been looking for a replacement. We've gone to every store near us, and when we were visiting my sons in New York, we even went to their local stores to look. WalMart, Target, K-Mart, Lowes, Home Depot, Sears, The Christmas Tree Shop, Rite Aide, we've tried them all. The trees were either too tall, too short, had papery needles that I didn't like or trust, was to skimpy, or was just too expensive. So far, we don't have a new Christmas tree.

"We could always get a live tree." my husband said.

"Live as in balled, or live as in cut?"

"Whichever." he replied refusing to get into that conversation again.

I don't mind a live, balled tree. The only problem is, to get a tree that is big enough, you run into a quite considerable price tag.

I don't like cut trees. If we lived in the wilderness, or on enough acreage, where we could re-use the tree, I wouldn't mind a cut tree. In the winter, we could make it into a refuge for little animals and a feeder for birds. Come spring, we could put it through a chipper and make it mulch. But we don't live on acreage anymore, we live in a development where the neighbors get cranky at seeing brown, tinder dry trees that could set the whole neighborhood on fire sitting in their neighbor's yard.

The idea of ending a tree's life, so that it can end up with a bunch of other trees in a landfill makes me feel depressed. Even when I am reassured that the tree was planted on a tree farm for just that purpose, and that it's replacement has already been replanted on the same farm.

It's just hippies like me, that go out into the wilderness to cut down a tree these days. So there!!!! I've been told.

So I was home, and my husband was at work. I was looking around my small, little (I'm being redundant, I know), very un-Christmas-y home when the thought came to me "Heck! Both of us are too stubborn to buy the tree we like at such an expensive price until they have their half off sale. Why don't I put up my little kitchen tree in the living room, since there isn't room for a kitchen tree in this house anyway?"

So I did. My kitchen tree is about three foot tall, and fiber-optic. It looked great in my kitchen decorated with cookie cutters. This year it looks good in my living room decorated with candy canes. May-be at some time I'll put some garland on it, but for right now, it really looks good in it's simplicity.

If you read my previous blog, I'm in a "less is more" mindset this holiday season anyway.

"Really? You're okay with a three foot tree this year?" my husband asked with a little disbelief after he came home.

"Yes I am. It's a beautiful little tree, you know I've always loved it."

My husband had to agree, the tree was pretty.

Does anyone expect that people who have their Thanksgiving dinner on the Sunday after Thanksgiving so the whole family can be together would be tied to the tradition of a full sized tree?