As our first Christmas season in Green Valley draws to a close it is worth looking back at it with pleasure and gratitude. This Russell family has long celebrated Christmas as a season that lasts 12 days. We are, alas, not so very good at observing Advent as a penitential season, but there are many positive things – many of them unexpected when we first started celebrating with children – that come from not trying to make one single day support all the build up and expectations that now come with the season.

One perennial source of anxiety, however, was getting a Christmas tree. Since the tree does not go up and get decorated until Christmas eve, we did not go in search of trees until a few days before Christmas. The children were always convinced that when we finally went looking for a tree, they would all be gone. That, so far, has not happened. But Christmas, 2017 was the year that the Great Shortage of Trees was a recurring story in various media, and Kathleen was convinced we would come up empty.

So it was that when, a few days before Christmas, the grandchildren, Francesca and Maribel, came to stay at the farm for a couple of days, Kathleen sent them up the mountainside in search of a Christmas tree of our own. Now the wooded part of the mountain has not been cared for very well. Cattle had not been fenced out of the woods and so there was very little understory growth besides brambles. There were a few little wisps of evergreen, but it was not a hopeful expedition. The girls, however, did not know that, and an hour or two later they came huffing down the mountain, dragging a spindly 10-foot tall pine tree. When asked how they had cut it down, they replied ‘we had a Swiss Army knife!’ Well. In the face of such dedication, what can you do? We did the only decent thing: we cut the bottom off the tree until it fit in the house, then rearranged the branches to fill in some of the more gaping holes. A string of lights, a few ornaments (too many and the branches drooped) and voila! A Christmas tree. True, it reminds one more than a little of the forlorn tree in the Charlie Brown Christmas special, but it has proudly occupied its corner of the living room for the whole season that it symbolizes. In my mind it is the Best Christmas Tree Ever.