Friday Family Fun: The Christmas Shrub Edition

It's the eve of Christmas Eve Eve! Are you all ready? Do you have all your cookies decorated and delivered? Your dozens of gifts all wrapped in coordinating paper? Your three Christmas trees decorated according to their respective themes and color palettes?

Of course you don't. Only Instagram does, and that is not real life.

I don't know about you, but in my real life, we didn't even have a Christmas tree until Friday, and it . . . isn't an Instagram tree.

I will explain. With photos.

Last year we cut our tree at Wally's ranch, since we happened to be there at about the right time while we were out cutting firewood. It was a pinyon, which is a nice shape for a Christmas tree. They tend to be somewhat small, but I actually prefer smaller trees--fewer strands of lights and ornaments needed--so it was fine.

This year, however, we thought it'd be kind of weird to randomly show up at Wally's now that A. isn't working on his house anymore, so we thought we'd ask our neighbor if we could cut one near his canyon. I always feel somewhat awkward asking for things like that, although our neighbor quite obviously did not care in the least. I know that because when I asked him, he said, "Sure. I don't care."

We didn't get to it until after school was out for the break, though, so we went on Friday.

First we had to climb over the gate, because the one we usually go through was locked.

This made it seem a bit illicit, so I was glad I had gotten explicit permission.

It was a beautiful day, very sunny, though it had been quite cold the night before. This meant that the stock tank near the road had a very satisfying layer of ice on it.

Who needs a fancy Christmas tree farm with sleigh rides and cocoa when you have a frozen stock tank to whack with sticks?

I left the family there and took my bodyguards with me for a tree-scouting sortie.

Not that they would be much help if there were a mountain lion, but at least they'd bark.

Unfortunately, we weren't far enough down to find the pinyons. The trees all around us were only cedars, which grow much more bushy than I would have liked. However, beggars can't be choosers, so I found the most tree-shaped shrub I could and had Cubby cut it down.

Then he and Charlie carried it back to the stock tank, where A. set it in the water while the children played some more.

Useful things, stock tanks.

The boys started climbing a large cedar behind us, so Poppy and I spent some time bonding with Odin.

Odin always feels safest when he's hidden. 

Then we brought our shrub home, set it up, and decorated it. I did this by wrapping two strings of lights around it and handing off the box of non-breakable ornaments to the children. This mostly consists of all the ornaments they've made at school over the past several years. So they actually did all the decorating. 

It really is a shame that my lack of an Instagram account deprives people of carefully styled photos like this one.

As you can see, our Christmas tree is more like a Christmas shrub. It does, however, have a very nice Christmas tree scent, and as the children were decorating it, Charlie stood back and said, "Now our tree is starting to look merry." So I guess they don't remember or care what our big, northern-grown Christmas trees used to look like.

Pretty sure all they care about is that there are lights on the thing and some presents under it come December 25th. And that, we can manage.