JOURNALING: It was the first Christmas with just my mom and me, my sister having married and moved to New York the previous year. At the time, we both worked in the downtown area and often drove in together. This one morning, as we passed a Christmas tree lot in the neighborhood, we saw a scraggly pine tree, hardly more than a trunk with a few branches at the top. We decided, if it was still there when we drove home that evening, IT would be our Christmas tree.
The attendant was quite surprised that night when I told him which "tree" I wanted to buy. It really wasn't a tree he'd planned to sell. He'd been using it to cut off pine boughs when someone wanted greenery for decoration. He gave it to me for
just a couple of bucks!
When we got it home and set up in a stand, we wrapped the bare trunk with
green yarn. We added some "twinkle" lights at the top and a few tiny ornaments, really stuff designed for package adornments, not for tree decorations. And, to finish things off, we added one red bauble down on the trunk where a bit of the wood projected out from the yarn wrap.
While it wasn't the most majestic or beautiful tree, it WAS cute and DEFINITELY the most MEMORABLE.
CREDITS: PEANUTS CARTOON: web; TEMPLATE: Unlikely Christmas by NBK Designs; KIT: December Paper Pack Mixed Media by NBK Designs; FONTS: Lemon Tuesday; Comic Sans