With Hannah in college, it doesn’t feel like the Christmas season until she arrives home. My shopping is complete (please be on time UPS!), but we just started decorating and planning for the holiday.

It’s our tradition for Hannah and I to hunt down a free-range, natural tree from the property. We keep threatening that we’ll prune some trees for future Christmas trees, but that never happens. When she was younger, our hunt involved hours of tramping through the woods studying trees. Hannah likes fat trees, I like skinny ones. These days, it’s likely we’ll take the first decent tree we spot.

This year’s tree came bearing gifts.

As usual, our eyes are bigger than our living room.

Hand-painted sea glass ornament balls are the new addition this year. These are the same ones I made for my Navigating Maine Christmas tree earlier in the month.

My favorite tree topper comes from a tree I won at our Christmas Tree Festival a few years ago. It’s a star fashioned of wire, threaded with green wool triangles cut from an old sweater wrapped with tiny lights.

I love enjoying favorite ornaments of old once more.

All in all, I think it’s one of our more beautiful trees. Traditional tree stands don’t work with the skinny trunks of our natural trees, so I’ve resorted to using a crock that first belonged to my grandmother. Inside the crock is a bucket of sand to hold the tree base in place (then filled with water). Wood blocks screwed together to keep the tree centered in the crock. It’s a bit of an engineering feat, but I like the results.

Past “free range” Christmas tree posts:

• 2010: A Downeast Thunder Christmas Tree
• 2011: A Little Bit Like Christmas
• 2012: Our Free Range, Organic Christmas Tree
• 2013: No Snow, No Spirit
• 2014: Christmas Past: Our First Home Grown Christmas Tree
• 2014: With Eyes Too Big for the Living Room
• 2015: Gidget’s First Christmas Tree Hunt
• 2017: A Late Start on Christmas