Tree up. This year it’s an artificial one. I somehow couldn’t get my head around cutting a tree down and then watching it wither for three weeks and then throwing it out. Despite the promise of Ikea and Jardiland to give me a 10€ gift voucher for the return of the deadish tree after the festivities.
Yes – a real tree smells good. Yes – a plastic one lacks the soul of a real one. But on the plus side, no needles to sweep up. Even cat attacks leave it relatively unscathed. And undoubted progress has been made. I remember my family’s sad little artificial tree – after a couple of years it had more sellotape than silver binding around its skinny little trunk. Even so it never ceased to make me smile – even when its tinsely branches had lost more than half of their plastic, frilly, green-leaf bits.
The new tree is almost realistic except it doesn’t have the half-metre of bare bit at the top which you never know whether to cut or not. It also saved all that sweating and sawing trying to get the trunk to fit into the metal jaw thing that is supposed to hold it upright…..
Straight off I sort of missed the piney smell. All was not lost however – one bottle of pine essential oil and a discretely placed diffuser and Hey Presto! One faux pine smelling like a small forest!
We are getting used to each other – the faux pine and I. Seems like this could be a winning partnership.
A Flying Aspidistra 