Saturday, December 04, 2010

Trees

It's time to start thinking of trees. We're not in the group of folks who put up Christmas lights on Halloween. We're more like the Bishop's Wife (the old David Niven/Cary Grant/Loretta Young movie) who puts up the tree on Christmas eve.  
We don't wait until Christmas eve, but we do wait until December before thinking about decorating. To us, Christmas is a special time of year and to decorate too early makes it less special.
We always do a live tree with roots that we can plant after New Years. We've had remarkable luck with our live trees, though the last two we planted died during the drought this summer. But our yard is full of trees we've planted through the years.
Our first tree was a white pine that we planted after our first Christmas in our new house (1983). It now stands well over forty feet tall. It's a beautiful tree and when we tell people it was  our first Christmas tree inside the house, they look at us as if we're pulling their legs.
I shot a photo this past winter that I called "The Snow Cyprus."  It too was one of our Christmas trees. Our blog-buddy Grandpappy did a watercolor of the photograph and gave it to us when they visited this past summer.
He does beautiful work and Jilda and I were blown away by the gift.
So, this week we'll begin our search for our new tree. We'd like to have another white pine, but we remain flexible because when we find the right tree, we know it.
Once we find the tree, we'll put on a batch of Jilda's world famous hot apple cider brewed with cinnamon red hots, we'll crank up Christmas music on the stereo, and we'll ease our way into the Christmas season.
If any of you are interested, I'll post Jilda's recipe for the cider. If it doesn't make you want to hug Santa's neck, I'm not from Alabama.

4 comments:

  1. If I had a bigger place, I probably would try a real tree. When I was a child, my Mother spray-painted our Christmas Tree black. From then on, it was no wonder why I am the way I am, haha! I have an artificial ficus tree that we use as our Christmas Tree. It's just the right size and odd enough. :D

    P.S. Cider rocks!

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  2. Thank you for following my Blog! I will now have the honour of being your 60th follower! i live in the next county to Somerset here in England, which is a real cider making county; That,s so good about all your Christmas trees. We try to do the same in our garden

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  3. We have been getting our cut trees from the same boy scout troop every year. I might try a live tree with roots, but I'm afraid I'll kill it. Cider recipe-yes, please!

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  4. I love that you re-plant your Xmas tree. The picture is beautiful.

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