The tale of our first-ever, real-live Christmas tree

I’ve had in my head for a couple of weeks that if my family was going to practice a slow Advent this year, I wanted to put up our Christmas tree one week, add lights the next, ornaments the next, etc. The first Sunday of Advent seemed like the perfect time to start!

One problem: it was raining.

I watched the radar and hour-by-hour forecast closely, and saw there would likely be a little break in the afternoon. It might still be a bit drizzly, but we shouldn’t need to bring an umbrella. After putting my youngest down for a nap, my two big girls and I headed out for the tree farm. My husband stayed home with the sleeping toddler, still not thrilled with the idea of getting a real tree.

Note: this was our very first time getting a real-live Christmas tree. I had high expectations. Probably too high.

In spite of the rain, the parking lot was PACKED. I can’t imagine what it would have been like if the weather was beautiful and snowy.

And there was so. much. mud.

I started really second-guessing myself. Maybe we should just wait till next week. Or even just after school in a few days. But my girls wanted to keep going, so we did.

We managed to keep our boots on, grabbed a hand saw, and jumped on a wagon heading out into the fields. The driver asked what kind of tree we were looking for (Fraser Fir? Blue Spruce? Scotch Pine?) and I responded with “Umm… we’ll just get off when everyone else does.”

The fields themselves were much less muddy, and the people were much more spread out. And it had stopped raining! I gave the girls instructions about the size of tree we were looking for (a little taller than me, as skinny as possible, not too many bare holes). They seemed to enjoy the hunt. “How about this one?” “or this one?”.

Then I started being too picky. And one of the girls tripped and fell hard over a tree stump and started crying. And the other complained about walking so much.

Some postcard-picture-perfect trip this was turning out to be…

Finally I agreed that the current tree we were looking at was The One. I knelt down to saw, glad I’d worn my grubby jeans (now I realized why I’d seen people carrying plastic trash bags). It was surprisingly easy to cut, and the girls were excited to help me carry it back to the trail where the tractor would come through to pick us up. We were back to the adventure being fun again!

Things were really looking up — the trip back to the barn, shaking and baling of the tree, and payment were uneventful. We even managed to get the tree inside the van, so I didn’t have to mess with tying it to the top. The tree made the car smell good, and it started raining again just as we left.

It was much later than I’d hoped by the time we got back home, but since all we were going to do was put the tree up that day, it didn’t matter. Our adventure for the day was almost done.

Inside the house my husband helped me clear the corner where we thought the tree should go (remember, this was our first-ever real tree, our previous one was 4 feet tall and we’d just put it on a table by the window… so we didn’t really have any idea where a good place to put a 7-foot tree would be!).

I brought the tree inside. Took the shiny new tree stand out of its box. Set the tree in it relatively straight. Set it in the corner. Snipped the binding and… voila! A beautiful cascade of branches as the tree fluffed itself back out again!

And it was very crooked.

We messed with the screws and wiggled the tree a bit.

And broke the small spikes in the bottom of the stand that were supposed to hold the bottom of the trunk onto the base.

Those aren’t really important… are they??

I held the tree. My husband (bless his heart — he never once said “I told you so”) worked with the screws, trying to get it to stay. The tree just would not stand up.

I was close to tears… this was NOT the way this experience was supposed to be.

Finally he went to the garage and got a 5-gallon bucket and some rocks. My eyes lit up. That was exactly what we did for the big tree we put up in our church! And finally our tree stood on its own. I put water in the bucket (praying there were no cracks), thankful that it would be easy to keep the tree from going thirsty.

We turned the tree just right… stepped back to look… and in spite of the needles all over the floor and sticky sap all over our hands, I felt an overwhelming sense of “we did it!!”

All week long I’ve been staring at that bare, empty tree stuck in a bucket. Even right now, as I type this, the tree is directly in front of me. It’s a constant reminder of how things in life often don’t go the way we think they should. We have expectations, but wow those ideas can get thrown out quickly.

I wonder what Mary’s expectations of pregnancy and birth were like. She probably didn’t plan on traveling 100 miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem when she was 9-months pregnant. She probably didn’t plan on delivering her first child in a stable.

“It’s not supposed to be like this…”

As we think about HOPE during this first week of Advent, we can be hopeful that things will turn out alright. Even when our expectations of how something is supposed to go get shoved aside. Even if it means placing a tree in a bucket, or placing a baby in a manger.

Let’s see what kind of adventure putting up lights next Sunday turns out to be… 🙂