Year-Round Christmas Display Tree

Many years ago I stopped buying cut Christmas trees. It seemed cruel to kill a tree just to bring it into a house and decorate it for a few weeks. Also, I always end up buying Charlie Brown’s 2 or 3 trees, you know, crooked or scruffy, the ones that no one will buy to take home.

For several years I bought live trees with roots and large buckets of soil. I planted these trees in the spring and they grew very well. Goal…

1. They are very expensive! At least for trees 6 to 8 feet tall.

2. They are very heavy.

3. You still have some needle drop.

4. You must keep them watered and not too hot.

Then over a number of years I compromised and bought 3 or 4 live trees that were 2 or 3 feet tall. These trees will grow and become very large trees and although I had a very large garden and it was roomy enough for 18 large trees, there came a year when I planted the 18th tree.

At the time, the best looking artificial trees were $200 or $300 and even with careful packaging and storage, they looked terrible on the seventh Christmas. My second artificial tree officially died this year when I unboxed it.

I went hunting for artificial Christmas trees.

Pink, white, gold, sticky and tasteless. There were even Christmas trees already wired with lights. Yuck!

And then I turned the corner… there was the most perfect, 3 foot tall, most real artificial tree I have ever seen.

Love at first sight!

$12.88!! I bought one and ran home.

Out of the box and her perfectly not-perfect little limbs straightened out here and there, she’s beautiful.

I studied it, if it wasn’t for that ugly little stand you’d have to be standing 2 feet from the tree to realize it wasn’t real.

I took a really wide but squat tree planter (from one of the purchased live trees), filled it halfway with packing peanuts, cut out a piece of cardboard, put it on top of the peanuts, then filled an old angular cake pan (it has the tube in the middle) with dirt.

I filled the pie pan with more peanuts, then cut more cardboard and put a circle in the middle on top of the tube and added another two inches of soil on top of the cardboard. I then removed the bracket and slid the Christmas tree into the tube.

Stable and lively looking for only $12.88!

I was impressed. I decorated it.

A friend stopped, admired my tree, then shook her head. “I thought you said no more live Christmas trees.”

I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t lie and say it was real or make an excuse, I just didn’t say anything. I shuffled my feet and looked down. You could say that I lie by omission and/or by detour.

People who know me expect me to have live trees in my house. I studied the tree again.

Packing and unpacking artificial trees is what destroys them. If you leave this tree all year round, no one will think that it is artificial. Of course, you would have to remove the decorations after Christmas and keep it out of direct sunlight. And when it gets dusty, I’ll give it a gentle shower and rinse off the dust.

I began to wonder about other vacations. With a little effort on my part, I can collect decorations or mottos for my tree for each holiday. A week before the holidays decorate the tree and the day after the holidays remove the decorations. Except for Christmas, the whole month of December my tree is decorated.

I had so many decorations for the Christmas tree that I divided them among family, friends, neighbors, and my tree.

I plan to have lots of fun all year long with my tree.