A rare reprieve in the hunt for the perfect tree
WE must get our Christmas tree this week,” Mrs Davey declared in a tone which suggested there was to be no escape clause for me.
It’s a particular moment in time during the festive season which strikes dread as my wife Sue is usually rather pernickety when it comes to purchasing the conifer which will swallow up a sizeable chunk of useable living room space until early January.
Not any old Christmas tree will suffice, however, because, waiting, hermetically sealed, in the loft since this time last year are enough boxes of baubles, garlands and glittery stuff to festoon a forest of evergreens.
Only the chosen special one, though, will receive this festive decorative treatment my wife metes out. The adornments are lavish and by the time it’s all finished it is difficult to see any real foliage lurking beneath layers of Christmas bling.
All I am required to do is facilitate transport to the point of purchase of the tree, then get it back home and lug it into pole position where irritatingly it always manages to reflect its twinklings off the television screen.
But it’s the selection process which always takes the time and in this year of the Covid Christmas Conifer I wondered how long this might take.
Normally we spend a hefty slice of a day zipping from garden centre to garden centre, weighing up the pros and cons of the various types of trees.
I am always in favour of the ones which profess not to drop needles on the carpet, although even I draw the line at those blue-ish ones which don’t look right to me.
My wife, though, usually insists on the remembered trees of her childhood, good old-fashioned ones, which, almost without exception, begin to shed their needles as you manoeuvre them into place. She is right, though, in claiming these always smell of the pine forest.
Anyway, spurred by a mobile phone message and image from one of our daughters showing her tree already in position, decorated and illuminated, we set off to find this year’s one.
Various potential destinations presented themselves. Garden centre? Garage forecourt? Or one of those pop-up pine vendors on a spot of unused land?
None of them, as it happened. This year we headed out of our hometown and just past its boundary turned straight into the drive of a local horticultural nursery sporting a humble handwritten entrance sign advertising trees.
Normally we would have driven around for quite a while before deciding on our first venue. Parked up, masked and gloved (for those pine fronds) we had been there a mere two minutes or so before my wife declared: “We’ll have this one.”
Who was I to argue? It wasn’t one of the pine-scented needle dropping variety, this one went by the name Premium Nordmann, was rather shapely and symmetrical, and came with a reputation built on its no-needledrop performance. For all of that it quickly knocked a £40 hole in the wallet and before I knew it was bagged, loaded and we were heading home again.
This was the quickest Christmas tree purchase I have ever been a party to. I’m guessing it’s a one-off occurrence driven by an urgency to not hang about buying anything these days.
Anyway, it’s currently residing out back, stuck in a water-filled bucket, awaiting its installation as our over-illuminated, heavily adorned, flashy annual intruder who’s going to be with us until Twelfth Night. It had better behave itself. I will be very disappointed if I find any needles on the carpet.