Building a Christmas tree

Myself, my brother, and my mother spent some time in the backyard this afternoon collecting some branches for our Christmas tree this year, as we are going to "build" the Christmas tree from them. Sound strange? I will go into our history of a home-made Christmas tree.

For the first three years in Oregon, we purchased natural Christmas trees, and thanks to having acres of land we were able to plant them all in our yard once the Christmas season had finished (we strongly dislike the practice of throwing away a living tree after Christmas, so we were fortunate to have plenty of land for the trees). In later Christmases we had a fake Christmas tree, but in 2009, our last Christmas in the United States, we decided to do something different and make a tree from branches in our yard.

We went into the woods on our land one morning and collected a few pine and oak branches. We allowed them to dry out for a few days and made sure they were bug-free, then we brought them into the house. After finding a suitable tin to place the branches in (to ensure they could stand up without falling over), we decorated it as we would a normal Christmas tree (although it could not have too many decorations otherwise it would fall over). We even placed the gifts for that year underneath it. It did not look anything like a regular Christmas tree, but it was significantly more fun making our own tree rather than getting a fake one out of a box and subsequently setting it up.

Assembling our own Christmas tree out of branches from our yard is the plan for this year, as we had such a great time making one two years ago. The only thing we need once the branches have dried out is a container to stand them up in, but I am sure we have one somewhere.