Well, here we are hanging yesterday’s popcorn strings on the tree. This was a hard shot to get; the kids were bouncing back and forth between Mom, The Dispenser of All Correct Ornaments, and the tree, tripping over each other in the process. So they’re a little blurry. But the tree is done, the rooms are decorated, and everything looks fantabulous.

I suppose that those who don’t actually live in the woods might romanticize our lifestyle a little—imagining us killing and eating our own bears; chewing bark when we’re hungry; and at Christmastime, chopping down some poor little tree in the woods (with a little red ax), dragging it home over the snow and propping it up in our log-walled living room.

Sorry.

Above all else, we have to be practical. We don’t have enough money to live a completely romanticized life. It’s the same reason we don’t have solar power: we do what works best for us.

I did ask Jess this year, “Why don’t we go get a tree from our property?” Her answer was succinct: “I don’t like killing little trees just for that.” Well, she’s got me there. So that’s one reason we use a fake tree.

I thought of another reason while I was out hunting with Tim the other day. We were walking along the power company’s easement, where the power lines extended overhead and all brush and trees were small because they clear them out every few years (to keep limbs out of the power lines, I guess). It’s like a giant corridor in the forest. I looked at all the little trees around me and thought, we could use one of these. But as I was looking at them, I realized a wild tree just doesn’t look like the plasticky ones at the store; nor like the real trees you can get at a Christmas tree farm. Those are so …full. A real tree growing in the shadow of taller trees will be scraggly because there’s not much light; and in the open areas like in the power line easments, the tiers of branches will be further apart, meaning the tree will still be …scraggly.

Our ancestors who hunted bears and chewed bark were used to scraggy wild trees at Christmastime, because that’s the way wild trees are. The moral of the story is, while we’re picking the bear meat and bark out of our teeth, we’ll be admiring the fake tree we bought years ago in town, because to our eyes it looks more Christmas tree-ey.

But they’ll be mowing the little trees out of the easement one of these years. Maybe, if it’ll die anyway, I’ll go borrow a little tree for our house next year.