We finally got a Christmas tree last night. It’s not installed yet, it’s in the garage, DH needs to look for the tree stand which is SOMEWHERE in the garage, and he has unwrapped presents in there for me, so I am not allowed to go into the garage (he says). I am at his mercy therefore. 🙂 When the tree comes into the house, it will.
The tree we got is different from any sort we’ve ever gotten. It’s a Scotch Pine, and was very reasonable, 50% off. It was reasonable in the first place, it’s not one of the more expensive types of cut trees. In any case, the place we were at is “Pikes” which is an Atlanta area store (plants and such.) We have gone to other places in the past, a set-up tree lot, a store like Home Depot or Lowes, Target, etc. Pikes has nicer trees usually, and they are more expensive, but also you have more choice of tree type.
We looked at the kind I like, Fraser Fir, but they were so bunched up it would have taken too long for them to loosen up to decorate (with Christmas being so close, usually I have gotten the tree the first week of December …) so we walked to another spot and looked at what else was available and there were the Scotch Pines and the first one we pulled out is the one we ended up getting, though we looked at several more before coming back to the first, as things often go. 🙂
According to info online the Scotch Pine is the most usual type of Christmas tree, the most Commonly Used, in other words. We have never had one. I will say that in my youth the fake tree my parents had was probably at one time fashioned after a Scotch Pine. It was horrid and worse by my teen years. They bought it after I was born, I seemed to cause all the trouble, not that I was bad, but that’s when things went loose. We got a fake tree and a TV when I was born. FWIW.
I grew up with a fake tree and held grand wonder inside about cut real trees inside. I wanted one so badly, and so when finally I was a grownup I could choose such one. I don’t recall (isn’t it funny, I don’t know about this) if I got cut trees for home once I was “working” and had some money of my own, while I was still living at home with my parents. I do know that being married we have had a cut real tree every year except for once we had nothing and once we had a live tree. The exceptions were the last two years, so this year I was open to doing it weird for us, especially since it was getting later and later in the month and we hadn’t done anything about a tree yet.
So we got a 6-7 foot Scotch Pine and I have (somewhere in the garage) a cast-iron Victorian-ish stand for it. I bought big colored strand lights, the sort in my childhood that sometimes were on Christmas trees, but often outside on homes (as today mini lights are used outside on the home, like the “icicle lights”.) These colored lights are large bulbs, straightline. It makes sense to use them since I never have used them and this tree is a wide open type. The Fraser that I love so much is tight and these lights wouldn’t work well, the mini white lights are nice on them.
We also were at Cost Plus World Market and got a small load of ornaments to do it all differently without getting into the stuff we already have out in the garage in what-ever-state-its-in, some is broken and some surely mice got into. We’ve found mice junk in some things out there, so the mice were busy this past year, and were for sure since we have about 10 cute little wild mice that, between the cats in the house and the dog outside, were caught this past month or so.
Last night we also got a huge weath to put above the fireplace. It was 50% off as well, and made up for the cheap price of the tree, but it’s always worth it to get a nice wreath, I leave them up until they turn brown, which is many months away.
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