This weekend, B and I are buying our Christmas tree.
It's not our first Christmas tree--we got that tree the first year we were dating, back in 2004. B proposed buying a 3' or 4' tree to add some festivity to my apartment. But when I saw the beautiful 7' fir at the store, I just couldn't resist. No surprise there.
All of the ornaments on that tree came from a Target Christmas spree and were plastic (I was living with 3 cats at the time and was concerned that they would break and then eat glass ornaments). The tree might have been sparsely and cheaply decorated, but she was beautiful and we loved her. We decided to name her--and all subsequent trees--Gretel.
Gretel's decorations have improved over the years--we buy ornaments whenever we go on vacation, and we have also been known to stock up on ornaments for next year in the after-Christmas sales. But we still have the plastic snowflakes to remind us of our first tree.
This year, I thought it might be fun to get a live tree in a pot and then plant it somewhere after Christmas. The location of "somewhere" had not been determined--our backyard is teeny and technically not even ours. But I liked the smaller-footprint idea of borrowing a tree and then replanting it, rather than dumping its carcass in the woods. I even found a Christmas tree farm in town that sells potted Christmas trees for much less than I would have expected.
Unfortunately, it's just not going to work out. I did some research online, there are problems galore with my potted-tree plan. First of all, a potted tree can only be in a house for 5-7 days max--and I want the tree to be up for all of December. Second, unless your tree is grown in a pot, its roots were partially destroyed when it was harvested, and the likelihood of the tree surviving that and the shock of suddenly being indoors followed by the shock of suddenly being in the freezing cold is not good, even for the sturdiest of Christmas trees.
I've come up with a compromise--we're going to get a normal-sized cut tree (Gretel), and we're going to get a small (maybe 2') live tree (Gretelette?) that we'll keep inside for December and then will move outside to our back porch (and hope it can survive the sudden cold).
