Growing up, I was lucky enough to live on a rural 5-acre property with a small pine forest as our back garden and a much larger, slightly spooky commercial pine plantation behind that.
So for my first eighteen years, obtaining Christmas trees was not an issue. My Dad would walk out the back and chop down a likely-looking specimen for us to decorate. But once I left home, it wasn’t so easy to find the perfect Christmas tree.
Should I search for a real one with its heady aroma of pine oils that scream ‘Christmas Time!’ but horrible habit of dropping needles on the living room floor before the entire tree browns and shrivels and ends up as an unloved discard on the front footpath in the anonymous big city? Or—quelle horreur—invest in an artificial tree?
#107 Explore Christmas Trees and Decorations
Without children, it was easy for me to do nothing for years. And years. But in 2021, with house guests arriving over Christmas, it was time to rethink the whole Christmas tree shebang.
What decorations are in vogue these days?
I began by checking out the council-inspired and commercial offerings in my district:
Tolerable, but hardly avante-garde or wildly beautiful.
In fact, over in the US, a Fox News Christmas tree in Manhattan, (described by Fox anchors as the ‘All-American Christmas Tree’) so annoyed somebody with its ‘ho-hum’ appearance that it was set alight:
There’s always the problems with storage for decorations that are only used for a couple of weeks a year, so I decided any type of large artificial tree was out of the question.
External house decorations are fun to view on an evening drive:
But climbing up a ladder at my age would be just silly, so house decorations were out.
Then I came across a delightful Christmas tree in the neighbourhood made out of palm tree bark:
And friends of mine have made a clever ‘twig’ Christmas tree:
Top marks for artistic merit and clever design for these two.
I finally settled on a small [fake!] tree for the hallway pedestal, jazzing it up with some mood lighting and bundles of gaily wrapped presents at its base.
So happy days and may the New Year treat you well.
outsidethesquare101 
Hello! I have just subscribed to your blog.
All of these photos show very good examples of what a Christmas tree could be! Thank you for your Christmas spirit in celebration of 2021 coming to the end and in your looking forward to the new year. Like you, I have just published a new and special post entitled “🎊 Season’s Greetings: Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year 🎄🎅☃️” to celebrate the festive season. The post combines art, graphics, poems, music and animations. May you relish my new post to your heart’s content, as I have yours.
I hope that you will thoroughly enjoy the animations featured at my said post. If you were to visit my said post in situ, then you would be pleasantly surprised by a great number of extra features that cannot be seen via the WordPress Reader.
I would also like to inform you that when you visit my blog, it is preferrable to use a desktop or laptop computer with a large screen to view the rich multimedia contents available for heightening your multisensory enjoyment at my blog, which could be too powerful and feature-rich for iPad, iPhone, tablet or other portable devices to handle properly or adequately. Please enjoy your browsing my blog at this festive season!
Wishing you a Happy New Year ☃️🎅!
May you find the rest of 2021 and the forthcoming 2022 very much to your liking and highly conducive to your writing, reading, thinking and blogging whatever topics that take your intellectual fancy and creative whim!
Take care and prosper!
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle
Thank you SoundEagle,
Your blog sounds amazing!
You are very welcome. I would like to invite you to my newly published post, which is also about love, and which features my musical composition entitled “Till Eternity“.
This newest post contains many brand-new features that may greatly captivate you in various ways. The post is entitled “🏝💗 Romancing by the Beach and Sea with True Love and Reminiscence 😶🌫🐚🐟“. It is available at
Please turn on your finest speakers or headphones, as my post will be playing music to you automatically.
The post also contains the composition of mine entitled “Lost In Love“.
Please enjoy! I welcome your thoughts and feedback there.
Furthermore, since my intricate blog contains advanced styling and multimedia components plus animations, it is advisable to avoid viewing the contents of my blog using the WordPress Reader, which cannot show many of the advanced features and animations in my posts and pages. It is best to read the posts and pages directly in my blog so that you will be able to savour and relish all of the refined and glorious details plus animations. Please enjoy exploring the various contents on my blog to your heart’s content!
Wishing you and your family a productive week doing or enjoying whatever that satisfies you the most, whether physically, intellectually or spiritually!
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle
Lovely!
Well I think yours is the BEST – by far the most beautiful – and I think the Palm-bark tree is the most hilarious and entertaining…it looks as if it is made out of dozens of pairs or old, worn out desert boots🤣😵💫
What a lovely surprise. Twigs did not show up on email version. Did you know the twigs (oak) swivel on the “trunk” (4mm stainless steel rod) into a two dimensional tree to make a relatively flat pack for convenient non-Christmas time back of cupboard storage?
No I didn’t know that! What wonderful engineering. Have you thought of marketing them? I can’t be the only one who has limited storage space, but would like beautiful Christmas decorations. 🙂