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Ever changing and staying the same
Traditions
Crow’s Feet Prompt #46: Traditions
When I was very young, we had real Christmas trees. Then my brother was diagnosed as allergic to pine trees. We lived in a house surrounded by pine trees, what would one little real Christmas tree hurt? My parents bought a fake one and I vowed that I would always have a real tree when I grew up.
So I did, even if it was a little live tree in a pot in my first apartment. I usually didn’t have much money for the nicer trees, one year I bought a 10-foot Charlie Brown tree. It was perfect. I am the type who will decorate from the trunk out.
My hubby doesn’t do Christmas, but he promised we would always have a real tree, which we did. Sometimes we bought from a local lot that benefited the Catholic school, other times we hunted our own tree in the forest (with a permit of course), and for a number of years, we got our tree from the Boy Scouts in a nearby town.
2011 was the last year we had a real tree and it was shorter than usual since it had to go on a table.
In 2012 I had been browsing Facebook when I came across pictures from several libraries that stacked books up to resemble a tree using periodicals that had green binding. A couple had garland as decoration. I took that idea and ran with it!
The first year I moved Algernon the stuffed deer head over to make him the tree topper.
The first few years the trees were mostly hardback books with some paperbacks mixed in.
2014 is when I started making the base out of the 1943 World Book encyclopedia set I grew up with. I also started using bamboo skewers stuck between books to make hanging ornaments a lot easier.
