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| loading the truck |
For more than 30 years on Thanksgiving weekend, Vince and I, and later our sons and dogs too, would drive to Schooley's Mountain in northwestern New Jersey and cut down our Christmas trees. (We always waited until
after the national day of gratitude to respectfully give Thanksgiving its due. Then it was full steam ahead until Christmas.)
We started with one blue spruce the year we were engaged and by the time our sons were in school, we were up to
three cut trees to go along with the six other German goosefeather, faux and live balled trees which we used to decorate the inside of our house for Christmas.
Choosing Kasten Christmas trees was no easy task. Not only did they each have to have the right size, shape and color, one of them had to have a resident abandoned birds' nest nestled in its branches! You see, one of the earlier years after we brought home our trees from the farm, we happened to find a birds' nest hidden inside one as we were decorating it. I found out later that it is considered good luck to find a nest in your tree.
After that the boys made it a mission to find a birds' nest among the many candidates we inspected while choosing our trees at the farm. I would carefully remove the nests, spray them with shellac to keep them intact and display them in the conservatory in a vintage birdcage along with two faux turtle doves on the perch.
We threw 13 wreathes in the back of the truck for our home's front windows. Two more bigger wreaths for
the front and back doors and a 100 yards of pine roping for the banisters, doorways and mantels. It was a production!
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| the Sadicks always brought a tailgate breakfast |
Most of the time it was just our family who made the trek west to the mountains, but occasionally other families followed us to our secret Christmas tree farm, Twin Maples, for their Christmas tree too.
The kids would feed apples and lifesavers to the horses on the farm while Vince tied the trees securely to the truck roof and I cut down mounds of bittersweet vine from the trees on the side of the road nearby to use as decoration at home.
It was a merry time and we would sing
O Christmas Tree from the top of our lungs
all the way to and fro!
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| our last visit to Ray at Twin Maples |
The last year we made the trek to Twin Maples Farm was just before I had started a new full-time job after staying at home for 21 years to raise our sons. Vince was commuting back and forth between Asia and New York with compromise stop-overs for weeks in between at an apartment he was renting in San Francisco. Our sons were both away at college. Our older son had just transferred from Rochester Institute of Technology to an animation art school in Emeryville, CA and our younger son was at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
I just did not have the time - nor the slave labor - anymore to string all the yards of popcorn and cranberries, bake the dozens of cookies and decorate all the trees with thousands of lights and boxes of ornaments.
We slashed our Christmas decorating down to the bare essentials. We only put up
one tree which we purchased at the local greenhouse and minimally decorated. The dozens of boxes of decorations remained in the attic untouched.
The boys insisted we still make our
gingerbread train station, but we made it a little earlier than usual when they were home from college on Thanksgiving weekend. We still put wreathes (again from the local greenhouse) and candles in all the windows and we still put out my
creche collection. It was "Christmas Light", but it still looked like Christmas. We still cooked the traditional Italian dinner of seven
fishes at our family's beach house on Christmas Eve followed by the German-inspired Crown Roast of Pork
dinner on Christmas Day at home and we served them on our collections of Christmas china. The meals were labor-intensive - and so was the hand washing of the dishes, crystal and silver - but everyone was back for Christmas to help pitch in.
Our Christmas decorating grew in little ways again over the next few years, but it never came close to the pinnacle we had once reached with our nine trees ... even after Vince gave up the San Francisco apartment.
This year we continued the tradition of the Thanksgiving weekend Christmas tree trek when we drove to the crafters' lot on the corner of William Nicol and Main Roads in Bryanston and picked out our 2013 Christmas tree.
Granted, it is not a pine, a fir or a spruce. It is a baobab. Nor is it made of goose feathers. It is made of heavy gauge wire.
But we think it will be the perfect tree for our first Christmas in South Africa. We chose one that is a half-profile of a nine foot tall baobab tree. I have the perfect place in mind for it!
These guys made the tree.
We put it out the back of the car just like we did at Schooley's Mountain.
And we sang
O Christmas Tree all the way home.
Well, it was epic. Dave Matthews performing in Johannesburg for the very first time. He admitted to being quite nervous at the prospect of appearing on stage for this homecoming concert. It was sweet!.JPG)
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