Ikea Tree

I very feel lucky that it was not called SAPENVARTNGREN.

Sagey came home from school yesterday announcing that her frienemy had asked her "where did you get your Christmas tree?" (what 6 year old asks where you got your Christmas tree?????) to which Sagey proudly responded "E-key-ah"! Of course frienemy's family had chopped their own tree down from their mountainside backyard.....Sagey, not to be deterred, remained pleased with our great Ikea tree bargain.

art shot

opening up

Tree beginning to relax itself.

(hacked off branches....don't worry, they did get used)

About 1/3 of the trees volume was on the very bottom on one side. The other side was naked stump, so much of it's branches had to be hacked off. It was sad, but it really looked ridiculous otherwise, and it might not have held up in the Ikea tree stand. I did have a moment of wondering if I should remove the branches from one side and wire them onto another, but that seemed too pathetic and maybe not the best life lesson for the kids, somehow....

Whew...it's real, and grew up in France.....

We found that at Ikea, you can buy a Christmas Tree for 20E, and if you bring it back in January to recycle, they give 1E toward reforestation and you a 19E gift card to Ikea!

Of course we also ended up buying their Ikea tree stand and a few other items.

The only catch is that you can't unwrap the tree, so we had to judge them shrink-wrapped.

We chose among the "fairly tall" options, looking for general chubbiness, though it was impossible to tell if it was well-balanced.

Finally we settled on a tree, stuffed it in the car, and drove back up the canyon in the dark.

It had been such a long day that when we got back, I just left it outside for the night, to deal with the next day. When I released the tree from it's netting, it turned out to have a certain natural charm, though it was wildly uneven, and very sparsely limbed over all.

However, I was relieved to see that it was from France, and had not been clear cut and transported from China, killing baby panda bears in it's wake.