by Jim Whitehouse
Usually, my beloved wife Marsha and I go to a tree farm and cut a fresh Christmas tree in the hopes that the inside of our car and house will remain needle free.
This year, we had time constraints and ducked into a store to buy one.
By the time we got it home, the inside of our car looked like the outside of a porcupine.
I stuck the tree in a bucket of water overnight in hopes that it would suck up some water and come alive, but it turned out that the only totally dead wood that ever came alive was Pinocchio.
Lugging it into the house while Marsha was off doing some errands, I managed to get it in the tree stand plumb and level. As I stood back to admire my work, I noted that Marsha would not need a ladder to put the angel on top.
Nope. She could just sweep the needles into a pile and stand on that.
I took the tree down and lugged it outside by the firepit. The rest of the morning was spent sweeping up needles, cleaning needles out of the car and using a leaf blower to rid the deck of the detritus.
Just out of curiosity I called the store where we bought the tree.
“Can you tell me when your Christmas trees were harvested?” I asked.
“October,” was the answer.
“Where’s the tree?” asked Marsha when she walked in the house.
“Don’t needle me,” I muttered.
The next morning, a Tuesday, I drove 30 miles to a tree farm to resurrect the old practice of cutting a fresh tree. I arrived at 9 a.m. and stood in the parking lot admiring the sign that told me the place would open at 2 p.m.
No problem. I knew of another tree farm 10 miles from the first one. I stood alone in the parking lot there, admiring the sign that told me they’d be open on Saturday.
After stopping for much needed gasoline, I went to a store just 2 miles from our house. I should have gone there in the first place.
Plenty of nice trees, all freshly cut.
As I sit here writing, Marsha is decorating the tree. As always, it looks spectacular, which is amazing because she’s only been working on it for 8 hours. (Kidding. Just kidding. Please, Dear, don’t give me The Look when you read this. I know it has only been 6 hours.)
Mistake made; mistake corrected.
One mistake I’ll never make again came early in our marriage when I insisted that we buy a real, live tree, root ball and all. I read an article that told me how to manage the living tree from the nursery.
Leave it outside and let the root ball freeze solid. Bring it into the house at the last possible minute and set it upright on top of a garbage bag to protect the floor and be sure to tie the top of the tree to a curtain rod to hold it up. Spend 10 minutes decorating, 5 minutes putting presents beneath the boughs, 10 minutes opening the presents, untie the tree, take it outside, burn the boxes and wrapping paper to thaw the ground, dig a hole and plant the tree.
Total time in the house 40 minutes, and the roots? Still frozen solid.
I did all that and the tree survived. Amazingly, so did our marriage.
