Searching for Christmas

If you read the most recent blog, you’re getting the idea that Christmas this year is more than just tracking down the right gifts. For us, it’s about tracking down EVERYTHING!!!! We’ve given our best efforts to celebrating and cherishing this special holiday with the resources available, and it’s become an adventure!!! With the stockings hanging from our curtains with care, we set out to find our tree. A few days earlier, we had seen a plant nursery on a street we usually never visited. We went back to the nursery on December 3, my 35th birthday, after Bobby and the kids had treated me to breakfast. There was our “Charlie Brown Tree”! It seemed perfect for us. We paid for it and took it without even asking what type it was or how to take care of it. (Not that we would have understood the answer, or even that the employee would have understood the question!!) So, we started calling it our “Christmas Fern”, because that’s what it resembled. I have since found out from a friend that it’s actually a tree – a Norfolk Pine! Whatever it is, let’s hope I have a better track record with it than with most other green, living things I try to take care of! So, after a morning of shopping, which ended with a trip to a bakery and a birthday cake, we headed home with our tree, sequins for garland, and lots of ideas dancing in our heads for decorating. That’s where the plans got complicated . . . . At the risk of boring you with too many details (which has probably already happened), I’m going to share our story. A few days after we bought our tree, as we came home one evening, a neighbor was outside trimming a tall bush in front of our apartment. Now, these “bushes” actually may be trees and had caught our attention recently because they look a lot like evergreens, but thinner. So when we saw the neighbor trimming off all these “Christmas-y” branches, we asked if we could haul them away for her. She let us have them, and we spread them across our living room floor. My initial idea had been to wire them together into a wreath, but there were so many, we began to see the makings of an actual tree! Bobby filled a bucket with sand for anchoring, we found a tall stake, and he began to try to create our own tall tree by wiring branches together against the stake. Our poor Charlie Brown tree had been rejected before it could even be decorated. Now, if the pictures don’t tell you how that project ended, I’ll tell you! It ended with a frustrated tree builder and our Charlie Brown tree again! We realized that we wouldn’t be able to keep this new “manufactured” tree alive very long, because none of the branches could be watered. So we gave made our little pine the center of our attention again . . . . .