Because Rob was out of town until Monday and I’ve been working a lot, we hadn’t had a chance to get a tree until yesterday. You know… Christmas Eve. We walked to the tree lot that’s two blocks from our apartment but they were gone.
That was okay, because there was another one at the foot of the hill, so we walked down to 42nd where that tree lot was also gone. It turns out that all the tree lots wrap things up so by four o’clock there’s no where to buy a tree.
We figured that Fred Meyer would be open and have leftover trees so we walked down to 30th and on the way passed a tree lot. With Trees! But it was locked and the attendants had gone home. Although we joked about hopping the fence, I suggested taking the somewhat more legitimate route and going into Freddie’s to actually purchase a tree.
They had five.
Five dry, needle-dropping trees that were free, probably because they were fire hazards.
So we walked back to the abandoned tree lot and Rob hopped the fence. We took a tree and left a note and $20. Actually, poaching a Christmas tree has a long tradition in my family. For decades my [unnamed relative] has poached a cedar from [redacted] on the grounds that it is growing in a place where it has to be removed anyway. It’s nice to have these family traditions.
When I saw the title of this post in my reader I thought “poached?” Boiled sure, or even fried, but poached?
Merry Christmas, Mary. Beautiful tree.
We have a lovely Douglas Fir Eau de Vie if you’re looking for consumable Christmas trees.
That’s hilarious! And for a last minute tree, it looks pretty good, too.
Those guys are probably going to be surprised by the twenty bucks you left them–I’m guessing they were expecting to trash the trees and not make any money on them at all. Or maybe sell them for firewood.
Well, we figure we had planned on buying one so may as well give them the cash.
The Llewellyn side of my family has had a longstanding tradition of poaching their Christmas trees, since the late 1940’s. Usually this would begin with an afternoon of drinking and smoking (with underage family members most enthusiastically encouraged to participate), followed by driving the family car into a neighbor’s lawn, directly into the intended woody victim. There would then ensue a frenzied bout of axing/drinking/giggling/peeing; and then the family car would drive off (down the wrong side of the road), leaving behind a ruined lawn, multiple cigarette butts and empty bottles, and a single tree stump. Thus are precious family traditions born.
Ah… traditions. It warms the cockles of my heart.