A Griswold Christmas?

After putting together the post on live Christmas trees, we decided not to do it this year. We decided instead to thin out the trees in the front lawn that were starting to grow together. That job has been on our list for some time now anyway and we need a Christmas tree.

I hate cutting down any tree, but if we didn't take one or more of those trees out then the remaining trees would be misshaped and would likely not grow quite as fast due to the competition. The trees in these pictures were less than half the size they could be and were already growing into each other. The other trees we've planted along the road since we've been here were spaced much better. In the end removing a tree or two from this group of trees would look much better and would achieve the result of shielding us a bit from the road.

Now to the Griswold part of the story! Not wanting to waste the tree we were cutting down we decided to take the top of the tree and make it our Christmas tree this year. The particular tree we cut down was 26' tall, but it had two main trunks growing together, so the only place I could cut it and make it look "normal" is where the two trunks started forming which made the "Christmas tree" 20 feet tall!

While it wasn't quite like Christmas Vacation where they untied the tree and it broke out most of the windows in the house, getting the tree through the door was comical nonetheless and it does take up a lot of the main room in the house. The door was a little over 2 feet wide while the tree was over 10 feet wide. We brought it in base first and pulled a few limbs at a time through the door until it was all in. When we stood the tree upright, we realized the width of the base of the tree was going to take up about 1/4 of the living room! There wasn't much we could do at that point so we shoved it into a place where it took up the least space and the top wasn't touching the ceiling.

Here's the final product.

There's a few additional pictures as well. The tree was so big I couldn't get a good enough angle to take a picture of the whole thing at once. It makes this room in our house look much, much larger than it really is but you can certainly get an idea how it fits.

The remaining part of the trunk of the tree I'll also be reusing for a support on an extension to the woodshed. After cutting the top for the Christmas tree we were left with an 8.5 foot log that should be just about right for one of the lower supports on my long overdue woodshed extension.

While we didn't go as eco-friendly as using a live tree that could be replanted I think we made the most out of what we wanted to do anyway which could have wasted a tree. We made a few concessions to make that happen but I think that has to be part of living green...not doing what you want or what is easy just because you can.