Father and daughter go out on a limb to decorate tree for Christmas
Many holiday traditions at the Miller house likely are variations on the traditions for many families this time of year, except for one: the length of time it takes us to pick and cut a fresh Christmas tree.
We go out first thing on the Friday after Thanksgiving and spend no more than 20 minutes picking out a tree. This year, we had three trees picked and cut within 15 minutes of hitting a field dotted with hundreds of firs and spruces.
After about 20 years operating our own Christmas tree farm, we’ve seen a few thousand up close and personal, and we know that there’s no such thing as the perfect tree. Actually, they’re all perfect in their own way for the right person.
My job in this Christmas-tree version of speed-dating is to suggest a few that I think look nice, get shot down on all of them and then cut the tree or trees my wife and daughters select. I’ve seen
(planted, sheared, sprayed) 10,000 Christmas trees (not exaggerating) and could have been happy with almost any of them.
Oh, I also pay for the trees – three times $65 this year – and bring our tree into the house and set it firmly in the tree stand. Then I leave the house for several hours while my bride decorates the tree, sometimes with the assistance of one or more daughters.
This is a good system. We tried decorating the tree together once or twice, and it did not go well – the same as wallpapering. My bride and I are better together for many things in life, but we are better off working separately when it comes to these two projects.
We work together stripping wallpaper. Then I get the walls patched and prepped for paper or paint, and she picks it up from there. When she wallpapered the formal “parlor” from which I write this column, I took the girls to a movie. We had a good time, and my bride had a blissfully quiet and stressfree environment in which to do the wallpapering.
It’s like that with the Christmas tree, too.
Except that I found myself longing to decorate a tree, and I remembered my dad talking years ago about what fun it would be to have a lone tree in the dark pasture lit with Christmas lights. So several years ago, I bought a half-dozen long strands of lights and did the best I could by myself launching those strands high into the lone maple tree in the pasture.
It definitely stood out. One of my daughters noted that the way I had strung the lights looked more like the outline of a saguaro cactus than a Christmas tree.
Because the tree is so tall, and far from the road, I left the lights on the tree year-round. Naturally, some strands burned out, so I threw more lights on the tree to fill in the gaps. Over time, it had become more wire than tree in some places.
So this fall, daughter number three and I removed all of the old strands and tag-teamed the placement of new lights on the tree.
I wish that I could say it took 20 minutes or less. Alas, it took the better part of a day. But we proved that a job that big is best tackled as a team, and the result is a glowing reminder of the light that came into the world at Christmas.
Alan D. Miller is a Dispatch editor who writes about old-house repair and historic preservation. amiller@dispatch.com @youroldhouse