Fiacré's spade: Cutting Christmas trees

We cut Christmas trees Saturday. Jane, Pat, and Nancy came up for trees, dinner, and Mexican train. Jane didn’t get a tree because her cat, Skippy, has an electrical wire fetish. It seemed strange to cut the trees while wearing light jackets, sort of like when Jane and I took a Florida vacation in December years ago. Palm trees and plastic snowmen. The trees looked a little peculiar this year. Due to a bad winter some time ago, the trees had normal growth at the top and bottom, and stunted growth in the middle. “Hourglass” is not normally a desirable shape for Christmas trees, but I find it has a certain charm. They are, after all, free-range trees.

Terry had a small, normally shaped tree picked out for Hilda. It was too young to have been through the bad winter. It was a Fraser fir with short needles. Hilda and Dad do not get on ladders anymore and will only decorate what they can reach while standing on the floor.

Hilda with her tree

Here are Terry and Pat getting ready to cut Pat and Nancy’s tree. This tree and ours are Concolor firs, which have longer needles. This is our first year with Concolors.

Preparing to cut Pat and Nancy's tree

And here they are with it.

Pat and Nancy with their tree

This is our tree during the cutting…

Terry cuts our tree while I pull gently to the side to keep the saw from binding

And after.

Our tree--look at the top on that baby! We had to cut most of it off.

We went inside to play several rounds of Mexican train before it was time to begin dinner preparations. It gets dark so early now that we had to cut the trees at 3:00 to be sure we had time before dark. Geez.

We were all in merry holiday spirits, and the discussion was lively. I interrupted play about 4:15 to calculate when we would need to start the ovens. Jane had brought take-n-bake bread. Nancy was roasting carrots, parsnips, and apples. Of course these two things needed different times and different temperatures. Before it was over, nearly everyone had volunteered to start the ovens. It was hilarious.

“Whose turn is it?”

That was followed by a lively discussion of who had played which domino, and who had been last.

Nancy got her vegetables in the oven. Hilda excused herself to put the finishing touches on the shrimp étouffée. I ran downstairs to put the bread in my oven so that it would have time to cool (according to package directions) before dinner was served.

At 5:30, the buffet was ready.

The dinner buffet

This is my dinner, plated. I haven’t had much experience with parsnips. I found that I liked them roasted.

Plated dinner

We finished the last 5 rounds of Mexican train after supper. Hilda made decaf, and we had very small pieces of Reine de Saba. The last time I made it the serving size had been two almonds. This time we only had one. We were all so full!

Reine de Saba cake--serving size is a wedge with one almond.

We decorated our tree Sunday night. Mom and Dad started decorating Sunday afternoon, but ran out of lights and had to drive to McHenry today to get another string. Our tree looks like this: