Oh, Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree
So last week I scoured the 750,000 acres or so of the Flathead National Forest where you can legally cut down a tree and I came to the following conclusion: It holds not one decent Christmas Tree.
OK, so maybe I'm exaggerating just a little. Maybe I only scoured a good 50 acres. And maybe, just maybe, it was a little fun. Maybe it's a Christmas tradition to complain at Christmas. Maybe if getting a tree isn't a fiasco then, quite frankly, it's no fun at all. But I would never admit those things.
All those above things could be true.
So here's how it went: I fired up the truck and headed up the east side reservoir road to a place I know where Christmas Trees grow. Thing is, the snow was a little deeper than I expected. I wasn't so much worried about getting stuck as I was walking out if something went wrong. Normally, I wouldn't worry about it, but the truck has been making a funny sound, one of those sounds that says, "Hey, I got about 150,000 miles on me and something's about to go to hell real soon."
And I was in no mood for a long walk at the end of a long day.
So Boy Wonder and I stayed fairly close to home, in a patch of woods that looked like it had dozens of perfectly fine Christmas Trees, which is to say they all had branches. See, the snow had fallen nice and pretty and Christmas-like which made all the trees look ducky.
Thing is, you'd walk up to one, give it a shake and it would either have:
A) Four separate trunks.
B) Three branches that somehow held up 80 pounds of snow.
So we walked and walked and walked and then it started to get dark and sure, a little desperation set in, I admit it. So I settled on a tree with just two trunks that was roughly 15 feet high and weighed something in the neighborhood of 300 pounds.
In order to load it into the truck I had the Boy sit on one end while I pulled up on the other. Fourteen pounds of bailing wire held it down and we were off.
Tra la la.
We have cathedral ceilings in the house, so tree height really doesn't come into play. I dragged the big ugly tree into the house and the girls oohed and ahhhed until we put it in the stand and of course, it was way too big.
Sophia helped me stand it up.
The conversation went like this:
"You got it?" I'd ask.
"Yeah, I got it," she'd say.
"You got it?"
"I got it."
"You sure?"
"I'm sure."
Crash! The tree would fall over in a heap of needles and cones. (Yeah, the thing had cones.)
"I thought you said you had it!"
"Huh?"
The wife reminded me about foul language at Christmas so I kept a tight lip. After using several miles of baling twine we got the tree up by lashing it to one of the big posts in the middle of the house.
"It's perfect!" the girls said.
I collapsed on the couch.
The wife and kids decorated it and now it doesn't look too bad, lashed there in the middle of the living room, like a trophy elk hanging from a post.
It's so big the kids can put a bean bag under the bottom branches and read. It drinks like five gallons of water a day.
But you know what?
Who cares.
It's Christmas, right?
Chris Peterson is the photographer for the Hungry Horse News.