🎄 Bonsai Christmas Tree Next Year ⁉️
Arrrggghhh, well it's back to work tomorrow.
Today is our last day off for the Christmas / New Year's break. We've always made it a point to try and take off from work during this favorite time of year. And it seems that each year it flies by even faster!
A good part of this morning was spent un-decorating the Christmas tree, vacuuming up the mess of needles that have fallen, and dragging the barren tree out back (in the rain) to the compost area, where it will serve as shelter for the many backyard birds and eventually rot away.
This got me to thinking about the live-versus-cut-versus-artificial Christmas tree debate. But that's old news and we all know that there are pros and cons to each approach.
But one thing I didn't know until today is that There Are More Trees On Earth Than Stars In The Milky Way.
Here was our real Christmas tree for 2016 in all of its glory:
And here's one of the live, potted trees that I planted many years ago:
Of course, the vast majority of people on this planet don't even celebrate Christmas and that begs the obvious choice of deciding to just not even have a Christmas tree in the first place. Maybe the $50 USD that we typically drop on a cut Christmas tree would be better served as a further donation to some local charity?
We've always had a real Christmas tree. We usually purchase it from a local farm or nursery, figuring it's better to give the business to the people in our community. And for many years, we'd go to a cut-your-own farm where you grab a pull-wagon and a bow saw and head out into the field to cut your tree of choice and cart it back to the car.
Our kids would always feel bad for the Charlie-Brown-ish-looking real trees that everyone would seem to pass up 😢
So I have this potted coastal redwood tree that my daughter bought for me about four and a half years ago. I did a Steemit post about it on 09/23/2016 and you can read about it here:
I have little idea about how to care for a bonsai tree but, nonetheless, I call it my bonsai redwood and I place it outside in the warmer months and bring it indoors for the colder winter months.
Today I was silently mulling over the idea of alternatively decorating my beloved bonsai redwood and having it serve as our 2017 Christmas tree.
What do you think? Oh, and wish me luck on convincing my wife about this one!
All images @cognoscere (except as noted below) (Sony RX100 V)
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Thanks for the up-vote @gardening-trail. I'll have to remember to use the gardening-trail tag next time, my bad.
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Thanks @steemtrail, that's awesome!!!
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Thanks for the shoutout @sceenname!!!
I do prefer my trees in the garden, I like the idea of your Bonsai Tree maybe if you had a few more you could make a centre piece :)
Well, I'm going work on the family and see if I can sway them!
Show then a few through the year they will start to love them :)
It may be a mess, but I really like your photo of the floor with the needles on it. Very artsy and well done! The birds will like your evicted tree, so there is benefit after its Yule life.
I'm a fan of using trees that would have been cut anyway, even if it's just cutting branches for a seasonal swag of spruce. That can be festive enough that I don't need a tree in addition to that. I have cut trees from land that was going to be developed into a used car lot, from thinning in the forest and abandoned Christmas tree farms, too.
Growing up in western Kansas, we cut the invasive Eastern Red Cedar that was the bane of any rancher. And one year, our family tree was a giant tumbleweed - there were always plenty of those!
And then, one year, this sad dwarf pomegranate tree in a tiny pot was all I had, with asparagus berries from the garden and fur from one of my cats. A Charlie Brown Christmas is OK, too. So that's a big upvote from me for your Bonsai Redwood Christmas tree. : )
Happy New Year!
Haha, that dwarf pomegranate tree would win any Charlie Brown Christmas Tree contest, hands down!!!
As to the needles image, that was taken as an after-thought, as you can see by the fact that it was already getting dark when I was editing this post. It was taken from inside our house at the threshold of the sliding glass door that goes out to the back deck, and where I exited the house with the tree.
It's neat how after-thoughts can be as good, or better, than our main-thoughts, lol! ; )