Monday, November 21, 2005

Tagging Our Christmas Tree

We Marked Our Tree
On Saturday, Karen, the girls and I were at Sposato's Tree Farm to tag our Christmas Tree. We head out each year around Thanksgiving Weekend to find a tree on this farm. We tag it and return a week or so before Christmas to collect it, cart it home, trim it and decorate.

Sposato's is a middle-sized tree farm between Milton and Lewes. They have a landscaping business and, I think, a Bed and Breakfast.

The tree farm is starting to be surrounded by subdivisions. I worry that its field of trees may be replaced by another collection of cul-de-sacs.

But, for now, it is still the Christmas Tree Farm that gets our business each year.

Our approach to choosing a tree is chaotic. We spread out among the rows of trees, each looking for those that meet our own preferences. Colleen likes tall trees. Christina likes cute ones. Karen likes well-formed, symmetrical trees -- though she also has a fondness for Charlie-Brown trees. Me? I wander around unhelpfully, taking experimental, expressionistic photos.

Eventually, though, we end up with a couple of candidates. Then, we have to negotiate. We post a guard in each tree. Tree-tagging is a competitive sport; we don't want some other family snagging one of our candidate trees. We hurry back and forth between the two, comparing and contrasting and discussing.

We work it out. There are compromises and concessions. In the end, we tie our family tag to the chosen tree and head back home.

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