Welcome to A Garden Variety Blog!

Although my neighbors are all barbarians,
And you, you are a thousand miles away,
There are always two cups on my table.
--Tang Dynasty


I hope you, whomever you are,
will sit down "with" me for tea,
or flavored coffee or spiced cider,
and have a garden variety chat.
Now and then.
I am not so consistant about blogging
as I ought to be.
I *am* consistant about
drinking hot beverage
and the coffee/tea is always on the hob.

Come on in!

Saturday, December 8, 2007

Bringing Home The Tree



Today is the day! We drove to a friend's Christmas tree farm, and found the perfect tree.

The traditions of this special day for us are rooted deep. Larry's father (Pappy Adams) was a Christmas tree grower, and sold wholesale trees, as well as taking huge loads of trees to Tennessee every year to sell on a vacant lot. Larry often went with them and sold trees. Sadly, that is now just a memory, and we can't continue the tradition of those years - that of Pappy bringing out a tree to us every year, from Pennsylvania to Indiana. He and gramma Adams came every Halloween, dropped off a beautiful baled (wrapped with twine) Frazier Fur. It waited behind our garage until December.

We continue that tradition as much as we can by buying Frazier Furs and getting them from Christmas tree fields.
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Today, we started with a horse and wagon ride through the Christmas tree fields.



The horses were black Percherons.





This is a first for us. How beautiful they are! gentle, patient, curious but still obedient.

I think we will add this to our Christmas tree cutting traditions.
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We also had popcorn balls, cinnamon donuts and hot chocolate in the little Christmas shop in the barn there.
We've made that a tradition (more or less as the particular treats vary), at every place we've bought a tree since Pappy died.
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Then we wandered the fields with a saw, looking for the perfect tree for us. Our living room has high ceilings but is very small, so we needed a tall, narrow tree. The last one we looked at was perfect!

So, we fulfilled the tradition of hunting til we find the right tree for us and then cutting it down.
(There have been years when we had to get trees already cut).


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And now we are home. Larry set up and watered the tree, Crystal hung the lights. And I am making sure we meet the rest of our traditions.

When we moved to Pennsylvania, we got our trees from a parking lot of a diner, and he always served a wonderful homemade cabbage beef soup so...

I cooked that tradition today, and it's ready to eat as soon as I quit playing on the computer.
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When we moved to Michigan, we got our trees from a tree lot where they always offered cookies and chocolate, so ...

I baked that tradition today.