Feed Them To The Fire

There are only two days left in January.  The Christmas tree should definitely be put away.  For the first time in many years, we have a fireplace.   The tree stands two meters to the side.   The other night, I heard a sharp crackling in the other room.  Entering I noticed my wife had begun to take a pruning shears to some of the lower branches of the tree and feed them to the fire.  

I thought about this.  Something automatic from my youth told me that A: you don’t burn pine because it’s sappy and doesn’t burn well, though this tree was rather dry, and the branches were quite happily burning away.  B: sappy pine is bad news for the chimney flue.   The creosote will clog it up, or worse, catch on fire.  I mentioned all this to my wife, who wasn’t particularly interested.  There weren’t many branches.  It was visually and auditorily appealing.

She clipped away at various intervals over the last ten days.  It was a slow denuding and a slow disassembly of Christmas ornaments.   What was left after a time was a rather scarred carcass of our tannenbaum with the star still atop, beyond anyone’s reach.  The lights still drooped down from the summit. Visually unappealing it seemed at one and the same time sacrilegious and at the same time, practical.  I asked her to draw the shades. 

Today, my daughter and I clipped off the rest of it, put away the ornaments that had been piling on the table in the living room and swept up all the needles.   The bare, clipped trunk remained with its root structure, potting soil and the large wooden tub that housed it all.  (that’s how the sell em’ here, folks).  Two men had brought it in.  I managed to get it out side.   

All the needles are swept up.  There’s a pile of branches there, clipped for kindling, as well.  The ornaments and the lights are in their box now, down beneath where the garbage bags and the shoes no one wears, are kept.  Curtains closed on Christmas, five days from a late lunar New Year.   I should probably go buy a saw so I can “recycle” the bare trunk.  It will sit there for a while, otherwise.