The Goldilocks Tree

What happened in my life to lead to this; a hole in the mud in the far corner of my garden on a Monday afternoon? In the rain. With a trowel.

Last year we made the mistake of buying a Christmas tree on route from an airport, where altitude seemed to have warped our sense of reality, particularly in relation to our grasping of physics, and in particular spacial awareness.

This year we did everything right. We measure the space. Twice. We set ourselves a top budget and maximum width, and even decided on a non-drop-but-you-know-it-will-so-hope-it-doesn’t-so-much variety. We avoided the forestry shop where we’d be taken over with sentimentality and pick the one tree that was 12 feet tall and almost completely void of branches on one side because we didn’t want it to feel unloved.

Instead we went to the local florists. They had just the perfect tree, and we thought we could save the environment by buying local. ‘It’s okay, we don’t need the pot’ I said to the florist, who was clearly dwarfed by all the trees, being only 5 feet tall, and more used to her shop being full of daffodils and carnations and less prickly things. In turn, she assured me it was just a simple base they put on all the trees, and that I could just throw it away when I got home.

Please note at this point, she mentioned nothing about the roots!

Having done everything to avoid last years farce, I was surprised to find myself at 9:30pm outside the front door sizing up a tree with admirable root-growth against all of the plant pots we own. With all of the weeds evicted from the pots, they were paraded through the house from back to front and tried against the goldilocks tree. Trying to hide from the neighbours, fearing they would call the nearest asylum, I quickly questioned the logic that doing this at the front of the house would save needles in the carpet as I saw the muddy drips from the pots creating a pretty pattern across the full length of the house.

Still, with Christmas over, the tree had kept up its side of the bargain and not dropped too many feet-trapping needles, and we felt sorry for it. We’re not vegetarians, but we will put spiders outside rather than killing them, and neither of us wanted to cut-up a living tree. And so, on the twelfth afternoon of Christmas I found myself digging a hole in the mud with a trowel as the blackbird and robin mocked me from the fence. As I dug deeper, my traitorous feathered friends were calling all of their friends over to see the strange spectacle of the human who, having kept an outside tree next to his tv for the last two weeks set about returning it to it’s natural habitat.

And it’s still there, a week on, in the garden. It’s still green, and slightly scrawny (we still picked the runt of the tree litter), and the birds hve stopped mocking me. That said, I’m not convinced, given the scrathes I had all down my arm, that it’s more unlucky to have your tree up passed the twelfth night compared to having hurredly planted it in the garden in the rain…