Brilliant … But Bouncy

I Couldn’t Do It Again.

For about 50 years, I have gone out with my family to cut down a tree. For a few years, I bought a cut tree, but for the most part, we have always chopped down our annual Christmas tree.

One year, Dylan objected to the chopping. He said, “This tree is alive and we are killing it.”

Still, every Christmas, we would happily choose a tree from our favorite tree farm. We’d bring it home and decorate it and watch Rudolph and sing Christmas carols. Then, for weeks, I would stare at the tree and watch it dying.

“We are killing it.”

After the holiday, we would throw the dying tree into the woods. I justified the whole experience by pretending it was compost. But mostly I remembered the dying tree, suffering because of me. Last year, with the pandemic in full swing, I just stared at that tree and thought about what I’d done.

I couldn’t do it again.

This year, I thought: cut tree? artificial? used artificial? But nothing felt right. I was leaning toward “no tree.”

Then I thought: we could get a live tree with a root ball, and plant the tree after Christmas! Since our yard had been destroyed by a “licensed arborist,” planting a tree now has a special significance.

So, I researched like crazy. And after much forethought and consideration, we went out and bought a live tree.

Here is why this was a stupid idea:

1. Unlike most years, the kids didn’t go with us. The root ball weighs substantially more than the tree. You can’t tie a 300-pound tree on top of an SUV. So the kids didn’t fit in the car.
2. The tree couldn’t immediately come into the house. A live tree can only be inside for 10 days – max – so we left our tree outside for two weeks.
3. The root ball required a giant bucket. No one sells heavy duty buckets like Grandma used to have. Thankfully one had been sitting untouched on our neighbor’s lawn for years. The neighbor let us have it for free.
4. Moving a 300-pound tree requires oomph. Without Dylan and Shane moving it from the car to the yard, to the garage (to help it acclimate), and eventually into the house, we would have failed miserably.
5. The tree branches – which haven’t been pruned for optimal ornament-hanging – are too thin for ornaments. We put on 1/3 of the ornaments we usually use, so it’s a bit sparse.
6. Planting the tree requires digging a ginormous hole, cutting through rock and roots, and then just hoping it will live. It took Dylan more than two hours of solid digging before the 56″ x 19″ hole was complete. This was a huge hassle.

And now, with the tree indoors, it’s a little crooked. The root ball isn’t quite balanced in the neighbor’s bucket. The trunk leans a lot. And it looks a little silly with all that empty space at the bottom, so few ornaments, and a dirty burlap sack and squashed cardboard holding it upright.

But hey: we did not kill a tree this year. We have done our best to care for it, to do the right thing for the tree. It will only be indoors for six days, and we expect it to live a long, happy life in our yard, growing to its full height of 175 feet.

And yet, there are no guarantees that it will survive the first week in the ground.

We will pray. Prayer is more Christian than Christmas trees are anyway.