Christmas Branch

December 12:

In the last Decade, Christmas was a Holiday we knew we had to simplify. The "Tree" was a good place to start.

For years, we had had a beautiful stately live Tree covered with our large and growing collection of Lights and Ornaments. We had collected those Ornaments in our travels and to commemorate other special events and relationships in our lives. Our collection was getting out of hand.

We slowly but surely discovered that we didn't need to keep an Ornament to keep a Memory of Something or Someone Special. That was a huge insight and not typical of Commercial Fodder.

So, we took our collection of Ornaments back to the bare Bones, to those that had the greatest significance to each of us. Instead of fitting in Tubs, they now fit in a box the size of a Shoebox, including the 1 string of Lights.

The Ornaments that we kept were the old ones. Some were worn and tattered, but they had meaning and story that could not be denied. We took the rest in boxes to the Thrift Store. We knew someone else would be delighted. Perhaps we purchased them for someone else all along.We decided that we did not want to "kill" a living Tree. We felt the "Tree" needed to be smaller and that ideally it would be from our Property. We scratched our heads and decided to have instead a "Christmas Branch".

No living Tree would die. And we could thank the Mother Tree which gave us one of her Limbs for our celebration.

Today, we put up the "Christmas Branch", or rather "2 Branches". Richard selected the branches and then we 3 C's went out to cut them. Then he tied them together, put them in a bucket weighted with Rocks, and filled the Bucket with water.

We brought the Christmas Branch in and began to decorate it. The decorating process took maybe 20 minutes. It varies by how long we tell stories about the Ornaments and what we are doing alongside.

We love our Little Tree. It is simple, humble, and concentrated with love.
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[Note: The ornaments shown include Red Socks from Richard's Mother's Tree, a Card that 5 year old Melanie stamped with images carved into the flat side of a Raw Potato, Knitted Bells I made for the Tree we had for Melanie's 1st Christmas.]