TREE!

It's that time of year when some people bring trees inside the house.  We are no exception, though it has been several years since we had a holiday tree.  Last year we were traveling to surprise my brother Jonny for his 60th birthday.  The year before I was in Oaxaca, Mexico for the entire month of December.  So it was high time for us to tromp around the woods in search of just the right cedar tree to drag home and erect in the living room.

Over the years we have had all kinds of strange trees, one year so large it reached the peak of our 16 foot ceiling, that was really too much, you could barely get into the room with the thing.  Another year we had one with a big hole on one side so you could more or less walk into the tree, that was unique.  I think this years tree is one of our best but it is really hard to do it justice in a single photo, it just seems impossible to capture the grandure of the thing. In this picture it looks kind of scrawny, it's really anything but.

The beauty of a cedar is the airiness of the branches and needles.  You can hang ornaments deep within the branches and see into the center and out the other side. 
To me this makes a cedar tree more special than a fir tree which tends to be thick and all the ornaments sort of perch on the outside of the tree.  At night the tips cast a filigree shadow against the ceiling around the bevy of hand made angels.

We have some very large ornaments and many handmade ones as well.  I consider this guy, Sterling Frog, to be the master of ceremonies.

 

Unpacking the boxes and rediscovering the many treasures prompts us to say "it's just like Christmas! Oh right, it is Christmas!"  As we pull out items that were given to us by friends, tin ornaments from Mexico, painted ceramic birds from Guatemala, remembering the many seasons, and trips and times with friends and family as we unwrap and hang the various treasures.

This little elf was one of my parents ornaments, a favorite from my girlhood, I hung him so he's looking down on me as I sit admiring the tree.  It's so nice to be home this time of year, not traveling for a change and just able to enjoy the tree.  We turn on its lights first thing when we get out of bed in the morning, watching it twinkle as we drink our morning coffee, nibbling on cookies or some other holiday treat.  And again at the end of the day, we spend some time soaking in the beauty and basking in the strangeness of having a tree inside the house, decked out as my father used to say "like and old whore".