A Christmas Tree, Dead Animal Skins, and Two Rustic Benches

Remember how I said I needed to find a way to block the Christmas tree off from the marauding, now-toddling (albeit extremely unsteady) baby? I did. And I'm so pleased with the result, you get to hear allll about it. Yay!

First thing was putting the tree up. Now, normal people have a tree stand. We don't. There is one at Blackrock, but that's the MiL's. There was one at our house in northern New York, but that was our landlady's.

I saw tree stands at the hardware store about six weeks ago and I said to A., "I should get one now. If I don't get one now, it will all of a sudden be time to put up the Christmas tree and I won't have it and will be 150 miles away from a tree stand."

I didn't buy it. And my prediction was correct.

However! Our small pinyon pine is only about three feet tall, so it's not some huge, heavy fir that requires a lot of infrastructure to stay upright. A. was sure he could find a way to anchor it securely enough. He did.

He found an old metal bucket left behind by Dale the Bachelor, put the tree in it, and filled around the tree with stones. With the addition of water, the bucket was sufficiently heavy to hold the tree upright.

Under this we wanted something to catch the inevitable drips of water when I re-fill the bucket, so we put a rubber pan of the sort used for livestock care. And under that, because I knew the tree needed to be elevated to get it up above its barricade (more on that in a second), A. put his small handmade bench.

He made this bench years ago at Blackrock out of slabs of hand-planed wood and no hardware, just drilled out holes for the whittled legs to fit in. It's very rustic, quite attractive, and actually extremely useful.

I liked the way all of this looked so much that I didn't bother with our tree skirt. I never liked it, anyway.*

Perfect.

The barricade I decided to use is the Taos bench. This is actually a sort of couch--in fact, it used to be the dog couch at Blackrock--given to us by the MiL when we moved. She'd had it for many years, acquiring it from friends when she lived in New Mexico in the 1960s. The story she told me is that it originally came from a juvenile detention facility, presumably in Taos. I have no idea how old this thing actually is, but it is also handmade and hand-carved with no hardware used in its construction, just wooden pegs. Much like A.'s bench, although slightly more refined.

All I had to do was angle it across the corner the tree was in and boom: No babies allowed.

When I started stringing the lights (my favorite task, as you may recall), Cubby and Poppy were the only ones in the house. I had found a box of A.'s furs when I was getting out the tree decorations, so I gave that to Cubby to entertain the baby with.

I haven't had a child yet who isn't enthralled with dead animal skins.

I did wait until she was down for a nap before starting with the ornaments, because letting the three boys help me was bad enough without adding a baby into the mix. There aren't enough furs in the world to distract her from that craziness.

Anyway. The tree was eventually all lit and decorated and I also added some further decoration to the Taos bench in the form of some sheep skins.

And a highly decorative three-year-old.

Those sheepskins, incidentally, are from these guys. Because I am vindictive, I may have said out loud as I was arranging the sheepskins on the Taos bench, "You guys ate my garden, but the joke's on you, rams."

Anyway.

The real test of the barricade, of course, came when Poppy woke up from her nap. As predicted, she crawled straight over to the bench and tried to find a way to the tree.

"Wait. I can't get to the temptingly shiny plant with all the toys hung on it?"

"YOU DID THIS TO ME, YOU CRUEL MOTHER."

That's right, Poppy, I did. I'm pretty proud of it, too.

* Why is it so hard to find a tree skirt that isn't ugly, garish, or cheap-looking? I've not yet succeeded in this quest, anyway.