Christmas Tree Quest
When I was around 11 years old, my mother purchased five acres off-grid in the mountains, and my family never bought a Christmas tree again.
The land, which turned out to be just too expensive to build on, ended up being little more than our own personal tree lot for many, many years. Each holiday season, we would drive up the hill and pick out one of the many firs that adorned the property. When I started dating my future husband, he was quickly enlisted as the official tree cutter, and joined us on these outings.
Some years later, after we were married and had two small children, my husband and I ended up moving to that off-grid mountain property. Since it was still far too expensive to build properly, we put up a yurt and made do with a small generator and a couple old car batteries for power, a compost toilet, and about five gallons of water a day, since there was no water on the property and we had to bring it in.
Our first Christmas in the yurt, we faced a small dilemma. Should we go out in the backyard for our Christmas tree? Somehow that didn’t seem very special. So instead, we bought a Forest Service tree permit, and started trekking further up into the mountains to find the perfect Christmas centerpiece. We quickly learned the same species tree from a higher elevation was much stronger, and could hold twice as many ornaments without drooping. So it became our quest to search higher and higher each year (although snow and access was often a limiting factor).
Christmas in the yurt was always magical. Since the ceilings were 14 ft in the center, we, of course, opted to put the tree there, and always found one to do the space justice. And even though we could only light it for the hour or so a day when we would run the generator, It was so beautiful and would light up the entire (one) room. Yurts have a wonderful ambiance any day. The fresh scent of the Christmas tree, the twinkling lights, snow falling outside and a pot of snow melting on the wood stove: these are some of my favorite Christmas time memories. The days in the yurt when we lived a simple lifestyle and our children were little and filled with the magic of Christmas.
