Oh, Christmas Tree

A tree has been living in our Living Room for the past 5 weeks.  It is a beautiful fir tree that our family cut down together at a Christmas tree farm 2 hours from home.  This has become a tradition for our family and each one looks forward to it for differing reasons.

I am very grateful to our tree for bringing the smell of Northern Minnesota woods into our home.  Every day it has graced the room with its fragrance and I, in return, needed to either speak to it and thank it for its beauty or stroke its branches while sitting quietly beside it reading something having to do with the Christmas holiday season.  My husband said it was still taking in water and we could keep it longer but I felt the Christmas season had to come to an end in some way or I would be tempted to replace it with another and another and another until all the ritual passings of the new year would find a fresh fir standing tall and green within our home. 

I never used to pay this much attention to trees boughten for the holidays; it was more about where I bought them then what I bought.  I always tried to find some kind of charity with my purchase but as the years went by the pungent smell of the town boughten firs also seemed to disappear.  We would put it up and before you knew it it was time to take it down.  Somewhere in there we would enjoy the beauty of the decorations and lights but mostly it would be too little and border on too much work for that amount of time.  It stayed this way until my focus of Christmas expanded even more than it had been before.

The more I looked for God so that I could do my part in deepening our relationship the more I began to “see” and “hear” and “smell” and “taste”.  God’s outpouring of love to me has awakened all of my senses and it is through this that I have begun to appreciate the loveliness of the fir.  It has always been there.  It was me that wasn’t present.  I was always ½ a day behind what I really wanted to do or multi-tasking to the point of not enjoying things I was making preparations for.  I will remember the smell of this wonderful tree and hopefully smile as I think of God’s love for me.

We recycle our Christmas trees by making ornaments out of their branches, or by covering plants when there is a chance of a sudden frost, or by shaking the pine needles over the strawberries as a natural fertilizer.  Its life is a full one.  When it makes its way out of our living room this evening, it will be set up in the front of the house as shelter for the birds until Spring.  My daughters will make popcorn strings or seed balls to feed the animals for the next few months.  It will continue to stand tall and straight giving neighbors a reason to take a second look and wonder when we planted that tree and they never noticed it before now.