Yesterday afternoon my brother and I were sitting by the fire, conspiring over plans to put up a Christmas tree. Daniel suggested that we buy a real tree this year since Home Depot was selling them cheap, and I agreed this would be great since Zsolt is used to having a real tree whenever he celebrates Christmas in Hungary. The Zsoltster will be here with us this year in Canada, so maybe a real tree would help him feel more at home. (?)
So that was the plan – we were off to buy a tree. Until Tony Buzz-Kill showed up and said, “no tree for two more weeks,” claiming it was “way too early” to buy a real tree for Christmas.
WordPress has this lovely feature that allows me to create a poll in my post. So – first time ever, here’s a bumpyboobs poll: Should we buy a tree and enjoy the Christmas cheer, or is my father, aka. the grinch, right and we need to wait?
What do you think?
Bumpyboobs ~CatherineBrunelleWrites 
When I was a kid in Barbados, fresh cut Christmas trees from Canada would come by boat. The boat part was painfully obvious the one year when the boat lost its cargo of Christmas trees during a storm in the Gulf of Mexico. Very few people in Barbados had a Christmas tree that year (artificial Christmas trees did not yet exist in Barbados).
The price for a hard-to-find Christmas tree rose from $5 to $40 (a week’s salary)!
Typically, we didn’t put up the tree until around December 10 when the shipment came in, and it would last until January 6. By January, the tree would be very much dried out (i.e., brown) even though we had made a fresh cut on the trunk and had kept it in a bucket of water.
We only ever saw spruce trees in Barbados, so I was amazed to find that there were pines and other types of evergreens which were also used as Christmas trees in Canada.
Even today, for me a spruce is the real Christmas tree.
It’s cool that you’re thinking of Zsolt in deciding to get a real tree for Christmas. That fresh resin scent is one of the greatest scents of Christmas.
P.S. With 5 cats, four of which like to climb my maple tree in the backyard, a Christmas tree in my house would be a disaster waiting to happen. 😉
You have such interesting stories, Francoise. Sounds like those Christmas trees meant heaps to you.
We just put up our tree this weekend. First one since Mom passed away (3 Holiday seasons now). It smells fantastic and is TOTALLY helping all of us not become Scrooge-like. I say do it!
Thanks so much, Tory.
Your dad has a point: if you buy it so early, it won’t look lovely and green by the time Christmas rolls around, and it certainly won’t see the New Year. We always bought ours in the second week of December…and it would last till January 5th-ish. Maybe you can put up all your other decorations meanwhile? But, you know, if you don’t care about your tree being fresh all season, then go wild and get one now : )
Pingback: Genetic screening for cancer gene – BRCA, etc | Bumpyboobs