Needles

Today

I popped over to my neighbour's yesterday to drop off a couple of pressies for the children. She showed me her half-decorated tree, explaining that said children had quarrelled so much over the job that she'd told them that it would stay that way if they didn't buck their ideas up. Seeing me notice that it's a fake she excused herself by saying that their two great dogs would damage a real one. She also complained that the Christmas tree at her place of work had dropped its needles within a day of being put up.

"I saw a good idea today," I said "Rent-a-living-tree. Brilliant! you have a live Xmas tree that doesn't shed and you return it at the end of the period, so don't have the problem of whether, after all, to chuck it out rather than start a mini-forest in your tiny back garden."

In My Day

Choosing the right tree, managing it and then disposing of it have always been issues. When I was a child our enormous tree was called by my parents a "fir". I don't think it was kept moist and, having started out rather sparse (deliberately chosen to make candle-management safer), it quickly became sparser as the needles dropped in showers. If you reached up to touch the tree needles became embedded in your clothing. The blasted things got all over the house, even sometimes into the beds.

Once the tree came down, the heaps of needles were vacuumed up, clogging up our elderly Hoover in seconds. The tree itself was usually taken into the garden where we would attempt to burn it. This wasn't as easy as it sounds; with practically no oil-filled needles to catch the flame and with wide spread branches which hindered the passage of the flames up and down, the tree could be surprisingly resistant. We often had to stuff newspaper between the branches all the way up to get it to stay alight.

So this potentially exciting event was often a little bit disappointing.

I think I might try the "rent-a-tree" idea myself next year.