The Christmas Tree

Although I'm a traditional guy, this year I decided to forgo the annual swearing-in of the Christmas-tree lights. I always think of "Catcher in the Rye," where Holden Caulfield happens upon workers cursing a Christmas tree as they struggle to load it onto a truck, so I make my light-stringing ceremony private, out of earshot of impressionable kids and wives. It is unfortunate that tree lights were not around in the frontier days, because they would have been much more humane than those terrible mutilating snare traps. Jim Bridger and the boys could have left a few strands of twinkly Christmas lights near the stream, then come back the next day and collected all the beavers, bears and settlers that had become entangled. I have planned to decorate my tee with Christmas lights setup Victoria. Some types of live trees can be kept outside in containers for a year or two. Others grow fast and must be planted in the ground sooner. Either way, this isn't a long-term solution to your Christmas decorations but what do you do the following year? Pretty soon, the tree won't fit in the house. The light-stringing job is increasingly challenging because my wife picks a bigger tree each year.
In fact, the tree was actually too tall for our living room, unless we went with the avant-garde horizontal format. I had to saw a foot off the trunk and re-install the big boy in its stand. It would have been easier, in terms of tools and man-hours, to cut a hole in the roof, but then squirrels might climb down the tree, reconfigure the electric- train tracks and haul away our Christmas nuts through the doggy door. I hate it when that happens.