Yule

There is not a lot of room in our cabin so we get a tree that is only about 3 foot tall and put it on a table. It's always an adventure looking for a tree in the woods. Most people are used to tree farm trees which have been sheared every year. Wild trees are much more open and much more uneven. Charlie Brown trees are the norm rather than the exception.
We only covered about a 1/4 of a mile to find one this year. I don't know if that means we are more realistic in our expectations or if we got lucky. Some years it seemed like we put on 10 miles! Snowshoes would have been a good idea but for some reason we didn't wear them. Oh well, the snow was only a foot deep.
We like balsam because of the wonderful scent. After we had cut the tree it looked a lot thinner. A lot, lot, thinner. Not a problem, we just cut another thin tree and put them together! The second one was a white pine so we had a ball-pine or a pine-sum or some such thing. Anyway, it looked fine. The goats get our tree after we're done with it and they love them. They don't leave much but the trunk and biggest limbs and they take the bark off those. This spring I'm going to transplant some balsam to the edge of the field. Out in the open they grow much thicker even if you don't shear them.In 5or 6 years I won't have to look as hard to find a tree.