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".

Finally a Fire!

I've been wanting a fire ever since the solstice, but between being sick, cold rainy weather and high winds; the elements were against me. At last today it was cool but not cold, clear and calm, I vowed to make a fire and enjoy my change of the season, calendar flip, solar shift ritual.

An extra impetus was the tall stack of bank, credit card and retirement statements that I cleaned out of my files. I didn't trust them to the shredder- too much personal information, but their was no reason to hang on to them, it only makes me sad to see how the old retirement accounts have just gone up and down and up and down and of course lately- WAY down, fortunately I've got a few more years to recoup the losses.

I found it cathartic to burn it all up and leave it all behind. I've been having a tough time breaking out of the laziness from a week of sickness followed by the holiday mode of not getting too much accomplished and wondering where the day went- again. Hopefully having completed my fire will allow me to move forward into a more productive space.

This is our outdoor holiday tree, the only one we've had the past two years, it's a beauty. This was shot on the night scenery setting of the camera which is a slow but fun exposure. The best thing about this tree is that it's above the hammock and so I lie in the hammock and swing back and forth looking up into the lollipop colored branches.

This picture was taking while swinging.

Last I had to toast a couple of marshmallows to perfection. My special technique involves the two-pronged fork for holding the puffy pillow stationary. Once one end is toasted I pull it off, turn it around and poke it back on and toast again, then the final touch is a chunk of dark chocolate pushed inside and allowed to melt for a few seconds before popping the whole crunchy brown, sweet, melty thing in my mouth.

AWESOME! And the colors in this fire were pretty amazing as well.

I should sleep well tonight.