I’m a lumberjack

I spend 49 weeks each year hoovering and tidying up the house trying to keep the outside off the carpet and out of the house. So that’s essentially: keeping the outside, outside. But for 3 weeks each year a great, glorious stonker of a tree is welcomed in, complete with soil, dampness and an incredible number of needles.

Yes, we know the water will find a way out of the stand and on to the carpet. Yes, we know a certain number of bugs will crawl out, cross the floor and find their way into the coffee table fruit bowl just in time for guests coming over. And yes, we know it will drop its needles like an amazonian monsoon, with each little green icicle embedding itself so deep into the pile of the carpet that even Harrison Ford’s archeological skills couldn’t see it rising again from the Earth.

But it’s Christmas, isn’t it? And these things must be done in the name of making everything festive.

And so, like so many people, we left the airport car park Row 6F, in search of the finest Christmas tree in all the land.

Mistake number 1 may well have been to not think about where we were going to display mother nature’s creation within our Ikea space-saving house. Although my brain may well have been thinking ‘4 feet’, what came from my mouth in all it’s Victorian splendour was, ‘One of you finest 6 feet Christmas Trees my good man, and don’t dilly dally’. And despite half of its greenery being deposited firmly in the pile of the car’s carpets, there we were 20 minutes later trying to force something the size of the Titanic through our rather more humbly-sized door. And then the wrapping which was making it narrower came off.

Once the shower of tiny green eye-poppers had found their way with Frodo deep in the middle-Earth of the biscuit carpet, it was time for the pruning. Branches were passed into the garden, and the tree was given a hair cut worthy of a Toni or Guy, maybe even a Rocko. I was Alan Titchmarsh and Percy Thrower combined. So now we had something only 4 feet across. Splendid.

I disappeared to make a slight thinning of the trunk to allow the tree to drink and stay healthy and, after a few seconds of manly wood-working noises, promptly returned with a towel over my thumb. A towel to stem bleeding which could only ever have come from a chisel to a manly digit.

Still, it’s Christmas. And after only minor perferations to the skin, and rather more substantial perforation to the thumb. Some ruined car upholstery, some even more ruined biscuit carpet, and a serious dent to the pride. There stood before our resplendent tree. Armed with only a few bits of tinsel, some dangling balls and fairy lights there was one more conquering of the elements by man. Maybe to everyone else it was no conquering of Everest, but to us Nature had been tamed and placed within our living room to show everyone our great triumph.

A real Christmas tree.