Weirdos

One of our traditions has always been to make our Christmas tree out of natural materials; sticks, sagebrush, pine cones, pampas grass, straw, poppy stems, or grapevines. It started because I’ve never liked the idea of killing a tree.........it just didn’t seem festive. I know how ridiculous that is as most trees are a renewable resource, grown on farms expressly for harvest, and replaced by seedlings. But still, it never quite sat right with me. Making our own was fun and Larry never seemed to mind. We did do an artificial tree for a couple of years so that Zoe had some semblance of normalcy but we ended up donating that to my girl scout troop in ‘05 for one of their projects. My point with all of this is that there’s been a coup and my holiday dictatorship has been momentarily over thrown in favor of democracy by a vote of 2 to 1. This is the first year since I moved out of my parents house that we’re having a cut tree and it’s beautiful. This is what Zoe wrote on her blog:

“Wanna know something pathetic?
Today was the first time I've ever had a REAL Christmas tree. You know, the living ones with the needles and everything? Yeah.....my parents....won't even get a actual tree for Christmas until now, because they "don't wanna kill the tree". Weirdos.”

I imagine this will be a Christmas to remember for her; her first tree. She’s asked if we could have one every year from now on............hmmm, I don’t know. But I’m glad she’s gotten to have this one. She is really loving it and come New Years we are going to take it outside (stand and all) and decorate it with peanut butter bird seed pine cones and popcorn for the birds, which was Larry’s idea. Isn’t he great?!