Weinachtsbaum Hunt 2009

Last year for Christmas we decided to get a live, potted tree so that we could use it again the next Christmas. Sadly, our little Christmas tree didn’t fair too well over the past year. It is slowly dying from the bottom up and now only has a few boughs of needles at the top. In my effort to be more green, I failed to consider my lack of a green thumb.

Since we were going to be here this year for Christmas, we needed to have a full sized tree and needed to get it early, before the baby came. So last weekend we set out for a Christmas tree farm to pick out a tree. We went to a Christmas tree farm out in Pech.

Germans generally put up their Christmas trees much later than we do in the States. Some follow tradition and still wait until Christmas Eve to put up their tree. They pick out the tree in advance and tag it with their name in order to reserve it until Christmas Eve when they will come and cut it down.

We liked the idea of cutting down our own tree, but unfortunately we couldn’t find a skinny enough tree to fit in our apartment. They were all quite fat at the bottom and a bit Charlie Brownish. Not having shopped for a Christmas tree last year, I didn’t realize that this was the norm. In Germany, they don’t do much grooming of the trees. They look much more natural rather than the full, perfectly cone shaped trees in the States.

After thinking about the differences between the German and American cultures, it makes a lot of sense that Germans would go for the natural tree look. They eat natural and organic foods, take a more natural or holistic approach to medicine and even like to swim au natural. Whereas Americans want the perfect tree to go with their Botox, pill popping and preservative laden food lifestyle

I spent a day looking for Christmas trees at the various DYI stores in the area and decided that Knauber had the best tree selection. Jim and I went back that night and found a nice skinny tree. The best part about a more natural tree was that Jim could carry it all by himself.

While we decorated the tree Jim drank some Glögg (sweden's version of Gluhwein) that we had been given to us by some Swedish friends. Even though he was the one drinking, it was his clumsy wife who broke an ornament. Jim had just said that he thought too many of my ornaments were fragile. Of course, I disagreed with him and then seconds later dropped a hand painted ornament which shattered on the floor.