The Big Tree

We have Christmas trees all over our house... small table-top artificial trees in every room that I've decorated over the years and they are small enough to put into the storage closet fully decorated. Some of the rooms have two and three trees instead of just one, depending on the size of the room. It's so easy with those little trees... just take them from the closet shelves and place them around the house. And voila! It's Christmas. And those table-top trees always looks beautiful.

Not so easy with the big tree, which we get right after Thanksgiving... a real tree that reaches to the ceiling of our dining room. Translation: we spend good money on a dead tree that was once living and after it's put into the tree stand, we keep our fingers crossed that it remains life-like and green till Christmas Day, or at least until our big Christmas Party, which is always in mid-December.

This year's tree branches are already drooping in places, but at least it's all still green. When you buy these real trees from a Christmas tree lot, you have no idea how long ago it was standing in the forest, with its roots still reaching down into the earth. Was this tree cut three days before it found itself in the parking lot of Home Depot? Or did they cut this tree before Halloween and it's been in cold storage for two months? No blessed idea.

Our big tree this year is very pretty, with its gold star (once belonging to Roy Rogers) right at the very tip of the tree. Roy wouldn't be pleased to see that his star is now pointing down towards the dining room table instead of being able to hold itself perfectly upright. The very tip of this tree is bending, which I guess can be fixed by cutting off part of the tree-top, which of course will make the tree a little bit shorter.

I just looked in the water pan at the base of the tree stand, and not much water has been taken in by this tree since yesterday. With a healthier tree, I should be re-filling at least half of the water in that pan every morning. This tree doesn't seem to be very thirsty... which means it isn't drinking up that water... which means that by Christmas Day the ornaments will be shifting a bit and I'll be hearing that pathetic sliding sound as the ornaments droop a little bit as each day passes.

There are at least 150 ornaments on this big tree (not counting the vintage bubble-lights)... one by one they went up on that tree... and one by one they will be taken down and packed away. I just hope I'm not having to un-decorate this tree till after Christmas. Every year, as I watch the branches droop on these big trees and I clean up the little needles that drop from those branches, I wish that my husband would consider an artificial tree. His answer to that suggestion (which I make every year) is that he doesn't want his vintage Christmas lights on a 'fake' tree and 'Christmas just wouldn't be Christmas without the smell of a Frazier Fir in the house.'

Well... I wonder how he feels about the smell of stagnant water in the pan of that tree stand, not to mention the unique aroma of a dying fir tree. And with all the money we've spent on real Christmas trees over the years, we could have had a spectacular artificial tree that doesn't die and doesn't drop needles and doesn't have to be standing in a frigid dining room because too much heat makes the tree droop even more.