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[Error: unknown template qotd] So the nice fellow senses that Christmas time is coming and he starts scouring the mixed mostly-evergreen forests around here. He's been scouring them since a couple weeks before Thanksgiving anyway, looking for the elusive edible wild mushroom. In "normal" years, and even more so in "wet" years, this is a rich, colorful bounty, fragrant and delicious. We're having a dry year, but we've gotten a few dinners of chanterelles.
A week or so before Christmas -- sometimes a little earlier, sometimes a little later -- he goes to those same woods and he brings home a treelet. He looks very carefully through the undergrowth. What he wants is an "ethical catch" -- he can't get a legal one in these woods. An ethical catch is a treelet that would wither where it stands because it is too crowded and overshaded by grownup pines and manzanitas and things. It's really a good thing to remove baby trees of this nature because otherwise they add to the dry stuff that might catch fire in the late summer.
So this tree -- if you've seen "charlie Brown's Christmas" you know what it looks like -- usually so small in the trunk that we have to bolster it with pieces of crap wood before the smallest tree stand will hold it. We also tie it to the curtain rod. Now it is too delicate to take the huge glass balls that are all the rage now, and decorating it in a mono-or dichromatic style like so many people do these days is right out because really, who could take that in anything other than a risible spirit?
No, we have a pretty big box -- by my standards -- of small ornaments we've gathered over the years. Most are no bigger than seven centimeters, most are a little less. None of them are proprietary ornaments -- no Goofies sporting their Black and Deckers, no Minnie Mouses drinking Coke, no Bettie Boops in Chevrolets.
What they are, mostly, is lovely little representations of fruits, bells, musical instruments, stars, and animals, largely birds, but there's no limit on what they can be, or of what material, so long as they are not too heavy for the tree. So there's a Guatemalan painted tin monkey brought by my friend thirty years ago, a satin penguin which was on sale the day after Christmas, some of the Italian blown translucent glass fruit I got almost forty years ago at Cost Plus, a flat wooden duck I painted with the kids, and a whole raft of mostly wooden musical instruments from the drug store one year. Not to mention the ugly plastic horns.
My daughter honestly is not into that spindly tree. It frustrates her. She wants a medium-sized normal tree. We did get one of those one year. My son was going to the grocery store one night in the season. There was a notorious drop and a huge puddle originating at the bottom of the driveway, and he lost traction and had to terraplane across the parking lot to get traction again. To hear him tell it, it was scary for him but he never really lost control. Anyway, the guy at the tree lot in front of the grocery store applauded his finesse and gave him a tree.
It's usually me who does most of the placement of ornaments on the tree, and consequently the top third of the tree is a little scanty. We get the Ukrainian angel doll given to us by the nice fellow's brother up top, though, which is a major feat of engineering.
I used to put boughs and mistletoe when I could get it all over. More than one year the nice fellow took a ladder and my son about a hundred and fifty miles south of here to an oak meadow very rich in mistletoe. I would not make the fancy kissing balls you see in sentimental illustrations, but I would dress them up. Lately I'm sort of more scattered than I used to be, so I don't have time.
This year the nice fellow brought a thing home from work. It was supposed to be a table centerpiece, I think, but it made a nice door decoration. Other years I make a wreath of extra pine twigs and other random vegetation and fight with it for its lifetime to keep it symmetrical and whole.
Other than that -- every year I say the house and porch is going to be clean for the holidays, and every year I don't make it.
A week or so before Christmas -- sometimes a little earlier, sometimes a little later -- he goes to those same woods and he brings home a treelet. He looks very carefully through the undergrowth. What he wants is an "ethical catch" -- he can't get a legal one in these woods. An ethical catch is a treelet that would wither where it stands because it is too crowded and overshaded by grownup pines and manzanitas and things. It's really a good thing to remove baby trees of this nature because otherwise they add to the dry stuff that might catch fire in the late summer.
So this tree -- if you've seen "charlie Brown's Christmas" you know what it looks like -- usually so small in the trunk that we have to bolster it with pieces of crap wood before the smallest tree stand will hold it. We also tie it to the curtain rod. Now it is too delicate to take the huge glass balls that are all the rage now, and decorating it in a mono-or dichromatic style like so many people do these days is right out because really, who could take that in anything other than a risible spirit?
No, we have a pretty big box -- by my standards -- of small ornaments we've gathered over the years. Most are no bigger than seven centimeters, most are a little less. None of them are proprietary ornaments -- no Goofies sporting their Black and Deckers, no Minnie Mouses drinking Coke, no Bettie Boops in Chevrolets.
What they are, mostly, is lovely little representations of fruits, bells, musical instruments, stars, and animals, largely birds, but there's no limit on what they can be, or of what material, so long as they are not too heavy for the tree. So there's a Guatemalan painted tin monkey brought by my friend thirty years ago, a satin penguin which was on sale the day after Christmas, some of the Italian blown translucent glass fruit I got almost forty years ago at Cost Plus, a flat wooden duck I painted with the kids, and a whole raft of mostly wooden musical instruments from the drug store one year. Not to mention the ugly plastic horns.
My daughter honestly is not into that spindly tree. It frustrates her. She wants a medium-sized normal tree. We did get one of those one year. My son was going to the grocery store one night in the season. There was a notorious drop and a huge puddle originating at the bottom of the driveway, and he lost traction and had to terraplane across the parking lot to get traction again. To hear him tell it, it was scary for him but he never really lost control. Anyway, the guy at the tree lot in front of the grocery store applauded his finesse and gave him a tree.
It's usually me who does most of the placement of ornaments on the tree, and consequently the top third of the tree is a little scanty. We get the Ukrainian angel doll given to us by the nice fellow's brother up top, though, which is a major feat of engineering.
I used to put boughs and mistletoe when I could get it all over. More than one year the nice fellow took a ladder and my son about a hundred and fifty miles south of here to an oak meadow very rich in mistletoe. I would not make the fancy kissing balls you see in sentimental illustrations, but I would dress them up. Lately I'm sort of more scattered than I used to be, so I don't have time.
This year the nice fellow brought a thing home from work. It was supposed to be a table centerpiece, I think, but it made a nice door decoration. Other years I make a wreath of extra pine twigs and other random vegetation and fight with it for its lifetime to keep it symmetrical and whole.
Other than that -- every year I say the house and porch is going to be clean for the holidays, and every year I don't make it.