O Christmas Tree...

First, some background information. When I was almost 12, my family decided to stop celebrating Christmas in the traditional (read: materialistic) way, and take it back to the bare bones of just remembering Christ’s birth with no additional hullabaloo. My mom might pull out a little nativity scene for the month of December, but other than that Christmas came and went just like any other day. While I understood my parents’ reasons for cutting out the stress in buying and greed in getting gifts, losing the holiday still made me a bit sad. Christmas has always been such a happy time for me, it makes me think of family gatherings, good will and charity, thinking of others, and that it truly is a greater blessing to give than to receive. I never really cared about what I got, but I loved spending lots of time thinking and planning what to give—when I was a kid these gifts were usually handmade crafts of mine. Now that I am married and have a family of my own (and in-laws who celebrate Christmas to a slightly greater degree than my side of the family), I decided to find a happy medium. I don’t want to go overboard and spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on Christmas, or make sure my kids get 20 gifts every year, or get stressed about making sure everyone I know gets something, but I do want to bring back some of that sparkle of joy that I always found in the holiday.

As a brief side note, Jon’s family’s Christmas story is the exact opposite of mine—they didn’t celebrate the holiday for all of his growing up years and then suddenly decided to start when he was a teenager. To compensate, in college he kept not one, not even two, but THREE Christmas trees up in his tiny dorm room all year round and wore a Santa hat all winter. On our wedding day, one of those Christmas trees mysteriously found its way into the backseat of our getaway car, but I digress. I don’t know what happened to all those trees after we left the country in 2007, someone else moved all of our stuff out of our apartment while we were gone.

All that said, I wanted a Christmas tree this year. After living in Africa for the past 3½ years—where it was somewhere between hard and impossible to find a tree—I wanted to do up my house “right” for a change, and in my mind that includes a tree. Yesterday we stopped in to Lowes to get a florescent light fixture and I glanced at the real trees; the cheapest they had in the respectable sizes were $16, which I didn’t think was that bad (I was expecting them all to be $40-$60), but Jon didn’t think it was important enough to spend even that much (we’re a bit the frugal type, you might say). I reluctantly agreed. Then today I was at Salvation Army…

First I saw a fake tree all set up and on display, but it wasn’t decorated. I asked the guy behind the counter if it was for sale, and he said yes. After conferring with another worker, he held up his hand with all fingers out. Five dollars. That was a bit better than $16, but the tree was missing a few branches… I kept browsing, and in the back I discovered one of those big cow-printed Gateway computer boxes full of that wonderful artificial evergreen—another tree! And this one I wouldn’t have to disassemble to get into the car, another plus. I searched the box for a price and found none, so when a lady with a Salvation Army t-shirt walked by I asked her how much it would be. “Oh, $3 I guess.” Score. I scarfed up the box (along with a couple strings of lights for 25 cents each) and was grinning all the way to the checkout. I was almost giddy as I loaded it up into the car, I really can’t say it enough that this tree. Made. Me. Happy.

When I got home I unloaded it into the hallway and tried suppressing my grin when telling Jon I got a tree—for only $3! I started pulling out the branches, noting their color-coded tips… I pulled out quite a few branches… and the base… and the top of the tree… but no trunk to stick all of the branches into. That was nowhere. I knew I should have checked the box at the store to make sure it had all the parts! So I ended up with this:

A heap of fake tree branches on the couch. I wished at that moment that I had bought the "expensive" $5 tree with a few missing branches. I really didn’t want to spend any more money on the tree—we are, after all, the frugal sort—so I looked around the house for anything that might serve as a tree trunk to hold all those branches up. I eventually rigged up this:

This is the tubes from three rolls of gift wrapping paper stuffed with a tightly rolled strip of cardboard from the box of the fluorescent light we got at Lowes. Finding all of those elements came very slowly, and with much trial and error and finding out that anything less can’t fully support the weight of the branches. So I got to know the awl tool on Jon’s Swiss army knife very well as I punched many, many holes in the solid cardboard trunk:

Then I started inserting branches:

And voila!

I think it ended up a little shorter, bushier, and a bit flimsier than it would have with the manufacturer’s trunk, but I was still mighty pleased with my little tree! Add those lights and a few Chinese knots:

All in all, I’m calling it a frugality fail but an ingenuity win! Now just to find some more decorations… but cheap ones of course, we are, after all, the frugal sort :-).