Deconstruction of the 2013 Christmas tree

For about the last ten years or so, our tradition has been to leave the Christmas tree up until the first day of the following year, and then it gets "deconstructed". The ornaments are removed and packed away for next Christmas, as are the strings of lights.

Then I get out my loppers and go to town.

I started doing this years ago when I would get frustrated by the incredible mess I made trying to haul the entire tree -- by this time quite dried out -- through the hallway and out the front door. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of dried pine needles would cascade to the floor, to be swept and/or vacuumed up later. There would always be some that we would not get, though, and some of those would invariably announce their presence via stabbing foot pains as they lodged themselves in the socks of the unwary shoeless walker.

I figured the fewer total needles falling to the floor, the fewer total little green daggers would afterwards lie in wait to stab our feet. I think the math works… sort of.

So I got a big pair of pruning shears -- what I referred to earlier as "loppers" -- and started cutting all of the branches off the tree before trying to move it outside. This allowed me to take small piles of branches at a time, and made for a much less chaotic transfer of the former Yule tree to the outdoors. I also was left with a naked tree trunk, and I have been storing these with the idea that someday I might make walking sticks or something out of them.

This year, I decided to set up my little Pentax camera to take a series of interval shots so that I could get a time-lapse movie of the process. I think it came out pretty well.

At the very least, it made Jeannine chuckle several times, which I thought was a good thing, as she always feels a little sad to see the tree come down. -- PL

So this was Christmas...

… and what have I done? I've taken down the Christmas tree, that's what.

We typically leave the tree up until the first day or two of January. This time, Jeannine liked having it so much that she rechristened the sun room the "Christmas tree room". But all holidays come to an end, and the tree was beginning to drop lots of dried needles, so it was time for it to go.

Yesterday I'd taken all the ornaments off the tree… or at least I thought I had. While taking down the tree, I found four ornaments that had escaped my searching gaze.

I got out my loppers, or pruning shears I guess is what they are really called, and set to work. It usually only takes about ten minutes or so to cut all the branches off the tree. Here it is about three-quarters done…

… and here, totally shorn of branches.

At my request, Jeannine took a few shots of me wielding the loppers (I don't usually wear my hat backwards, but I had been sitting near a window and the sun was right on my neck, so I threw my hat on like that).

And then once the tree was stripped of its verdant finery, it joined the last few years' collection of Christmas tree trunks in the garage…

… waiting for me to someday make good on my idea of turning them into walking sticks or something. Maybe that would be a good New Year's resolution. -- PL

A minor "Star Trek" Christmas miracle

Anyone who knows me (or has read this blog since it started) knows that I am a passionate "Star Trek" fan. My wife is not, though recently she agreed to watch with me two of my favorite episodes of the original series, "Devil in the Dark" and "City on the Edge of Forever". Her verdict? She didn't care for the costuming, and some of the acting seemed dated, but she thought the plots and writing were strong.

But even though Jeannine is not, and in all likelihood, never will be, a big "Star Trek" fan, she knows what it means to me. And last Christmas, when I thought I had lost my treasured gold-plated U.S.S. Enterprise pendant, which had hung on our Christmas trees for many years, she felt my pain.

You see, my habit for the last few years, when it is time to get the Christmas tree out of the house, is to first use long-handled pruning shears to lop off the branches. This makes the thing easier to move through the house and out the doors without brushing against furniture and walls and dropping lots of its dried pine needles all over the floor. (It also has the added benefit of giving me a naked Christmas tree trunk, with which to craft something cool -- like a walking stick or something. I have yet to actually DO this, but as of this writing I have four such trunks in the garage from the last four Christmases, just waiting for the right amount of inspiration and perspiration.)

Sometime during the process of clipping off last year's Christmas tree's branches, the Enterprise pendant was apparently lost. When we put all the ornaments away, it was nowhere to be seen. With a sinking feeling, I realized that it had likely been left, unnoticed, on one of those branches I'd cut off and thrown out. I was bummed out.

That Enterprise pendant is something that I have had with me since high school. It's my understanding that when the original "Star Trek" series was cancelled, Gene Roddenberry formed a company called "Lincoln Enterprises" to try to make a little money off the dead show and also to keep the fans of "Star Trek" happy. One of the items I bought through this mail-order outfit was this little (about three inches long) gold-plated U.S.S. Enterprise pendant. I don't think I ever wore it as a pendant, but it made a wonderful Christmas tree ornament.

So it was very disappointing, to say the least, to think that this nifty little bit of my personal "Star Trek" history had vanished forever. Jeannine tried to keep my hopes up, saying that maybe it had been left in another box of ornaments, and we'd come upon it at some point in time. Well, maybe… but I didn't really think it would.

Fast-forward to yesterday. We were finally decorating the tree, and in the process decided to winnow down our collection of ornaments. There were quite a few which were falling apart, or just plain ugly, or both, and others which were fine and whole but just held no great appeal. So we trashed the first group and set aside the second to give away. And at some point in this process of going through the ornaments…

… Jeannine found it!

The Enterprise pendant had, somehow, come to rest underneath one shallow box which had been set, fairly snugly, into a larger box, and had thus remained out of sight. But Jeannine was keeping an eye out for possible hiding places for the starship, and this one seemed likely, so she pulled the shallow box up, and -- voila!

As you might imagine, I was pretty happy. Yes, I know it's a small thing, and not really a "Christmas miracle" (a wildly overused cliche these days, in my humble opinion)… but sometimes all you need is one of these small occurrences to brighten up the day. Thanks again, Jeannine! -- PL

Flame without fire

Although fall foliage season this year seemed to get off to a slow start, right now it looks like it's really peaking. I took this shot on a bike ride Jeannine and I went on this weekend in Keene, NH.



I love the blazing yellows and oranges of these leaves, as they are lit up by the afternoon sun. -- PL