Your Perfect Homestead Christmas Tree

It’s now just one week until Christmas Eve. Have you found and installed your Christmas tree yet? The holidays around this homestead require a tree that must go up the week before Christmas and come down a week after Christmas, so let me lend a few homestead hints on that particular subject…

Our family stopped buying commercially produced Christmas trees as soon as we moved to our homestead in serious Christmas tree country. They’re a regular Big Cash Crop here, but take years to grow and a lot of work trimming so they’ll have just the right thickness and shape. Heck, there are Christmas tree farms in our immediate region that’ll let you come in with a hand saw and cut your own!

But that’s not what we do. We do have a cathedral ceiling in our little living room from when the loft was built, so we like our trees to be 15 feet tall. But even though Scotch pines and hemlocks and Frasier Firs grow wild on our property and in the forest around us, they’re rangy and thin from growing in a forest. You’ll have this if you don’t carefully trim your growing trees in view of future Christmases.

A tree that’s only going to be in your living room for two weeks isn’t required to be seriously fireproof and isn’t likely to catch fire before the New Year’s bonfire (when you burn it on purpose). This is good, because commercial trees don’t burn worth a darn no matter how long you keep them, and who really likes the solid cone effect anyway? I like some real depth to my tree - ornaments and silk flowers and bows and ribbon and lots of lights deeply into the tree, branches that stick out far enough to shade a lot of presents.

Because our tree is up against the wall, it only has to be half-round. The room is too little to accommodate a free-stander, so this is a plus for those rangy Scotch pines on the property that look good on one side, but have nothing on the other. If you put your tree in a corner you need even less fullness! Pre-planning is essential, and the most important thing to remember is…

Duct Tape Is Your Friend. Yes, we duct tape two or three rangy trees together (and add trimmed-out branches to the front wherever needed) in order to get a tree tall enough and full enough to decorate our living room. Yes, the taped-on parts will dry quickly because they aren’t in water, but as I mentioned, it needn’t last long. Once you’ve got the perfect thickness of branches and fullness of shape and height of tree, you can disguise the trunk’s duct tape sections easily with crumpled tissue paper, big ribbon bows and other such decorative tricks.

String those lights in layers from interior to exterior, don’t skimp! We love lots of little white and colored lights on the tree, use lots of strings. The tree itself is attached with cable to eye-hooks in the trim atop the wainscoting, so we just cover the base trunk and under-tree area with skirts. We don’t use plastic or metal icicles - these get everywhere, aren’t good for the environment, and don’t burn. We’ve been collecting plastic and glass icicle ornaments over the years and use those instead. They come off as easily as the regular ornaments do, to be packed away for next year, and don’t hide around the baseboards or in the rug.

So. If there are evergreens on your homestead, particularly scraggly young ones competing for growing space with all the younger ones, make your own Christmas tree and don’t forget to light it up at midnight on New Year’s Eve out in the backyard fire pit! It’ll decorate your holidays twice and warm you up too. What more can anybody ask of a Christmas tree?

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Filed under Activities, Family, Holidays, Homestead, Timber |