Oh Christmas Tree

According to the National Christmas Tree Association, American families bought 27 million Christmas trees at a cost of $928 million dollars in 2010 (the last year for which data is available). Almost a billion dollars on trees that were grown for 5-15 years just to be cut down and used as an oversize living room centerpiece for a month or two. Worth every penny I say.

I spent six summers of my misguided youth pruning Christmas trees. Lovingly shaping that year's scraggly growth into the perfect cone. Fighting against double tops and crooked trunks to make a tree that would cause a family to lovingly look upon it and say "can you believe they just grow so perfectly?" The tree pruner, the hidden hero of Christmas. Because I personally shaped tens of thousands of trees over the years, I have a pretty good idea of what a good tree looks like. I'm a hard man to please and sort of a miserable one to accompany on a tree hunting expedition. On the small tree farm we visit near our house I usually check out every tree multiple times before making my choice. We hike around and around in circles before I declare one the perfect tree and cut it down. We then drag it back to the truck like the trophy that it is, cheering wildly over our kill. We have a dark secret in our family though, our tree will never see Christmas!

We celebrate Christmas with relatives 1200 miles from our house. A journey that long requires a long stay to make it worthwhile, so we have to take the tree down before we leave. It's a little weird getting a tree right after thanksgiving and taking it down before it ever sees a present, but it makes our home happy. We get to hang up ornaments made at school and given from relatives. We get to turn on Christmas carols and wrap the lights around the tree. We get to yell at the dog to stop drinking the tree water. If we missed those things, if we just relied on someone else's tree for our Christmas joy, we really would be missing out on part of Christmas. It might not make a whole lot of sense, but it does make a lot of people happy.

No post tomorrow, family time.

No book reports this week either, I'll get to them next week.

Have a very Merry Christmas.