T'was two weeks before Christmas and all through the forest one creature was stirring looking for the perfect Christmas tree!Last Saturday, my husband equipped himself with a pair of skis and a hand-held saw and headed up the mountain with the gondula. He skied down an off-road wild terrain through untouched serene snowy forest to a place he knew well, a patch of forest owned by his parents with a little wooden hut in a middle of a small clearing. He criss-crossed the forest looking for the perfect Christmas tree for our place: not too big but not too small, not too thick but not too thin. It also had to be a tree which would not have a surviving chance in the forest and would die in a few years anyway, because we don't want to cut down strong, healthy trees.
He finally found what he was looking for, a pretty little thing which was rotting away at the bottom. He cut it down, cut off the brown, rotting part off, mounted it on his back and proceeded to ski down the rough to the bottom of the mountain.
When he brought the tree home, it still had snow covering its branches. It looked absolutely beautiful. If it could only stay like this, I wouldn't need to decorate it at all! But the trouble with any live Christmas tree is that it doesn't last long at all. Within a week of bringing it indoors into the warm, it begins getting brown and loosing its needles quite quickly. So for now, our tree is being hung out on our balcony. We're only bringing it in this coming weekend which is exactly ten days before Christmas. If we're lucky, it will last till after New Year's without going bald too soon.
