A Free Mini Forest

December was a very chaotic month around here. You may recall me previously mentioning that we missed getting our tree from the forest this year, and didn’t manage to get any tree at all for that matter for most of the month because the schedule was so hectic.  The Monday before Christmas I sent Dr. Peds out to get a tree, some sort of real tree, so that we wouldn’t completely disappoint our children, even if our own personal ax wasn’t used to chop it down.

Dr. Peds went to the grocery store, where there was a makeshift Christmas tree lot in previous weeks.  They were gone.  He went several other places.  No trees.  He drove down to the farmers’ market, where a local Christmas tree farm sells trees.  They were gone, but they had left behind some scraggly trees no one wanted for people to just pick up for free.  He looked through the pile.  There were trees with tops and bottoms and no middles.  There were trees with one side missing.  A few people drove up and grabbed some miscellaneous branches and drove off.  Dr. Peds grabbed two of the best  trees and brought them home.

We laughed pretty hard at the state of our poor orphan Christmas trees, but then we brought them in and decorated them the day before Christmas Eve, and once all the ornaments and all the crocheted garland and lights were on the trees, they really didn’t look that bad.  We hid the most sparse parts (which were really, really sparse) back against the corner, and moved on to joyously celebrate.  The kidlets thought the trees were great.  Any tree is great for them, although they were a bit disappointed about not getting to use the ax.

Yesterday was the day to take the trees down in our house.  We packed away the ornaments.  We rolled up the garland and lights.  Dr. Peds carried the trees out the back door and planted them in a snow bank on the deck, where we have plans of enjoying them for a few more days before we take them off to get recycled into wood chips for garden mulch.  It’s kind of like we have our own little forest right on the deck.  Ahhhh.

And our trees were FREE!  FREE!  We love free.  Free is almost as good as $8.00 trees cut down with an ax from the forest.