The First Post of Christmas: Christmas Trees

I have limited experience with real Christmas trees, I'm afraid. Growing up, we used an artificial tree except for the year of the flocked blue spruce wrapped in blue lights and bedecked in blue glass ball ornaments in the new family room with blue couch and armchair. It gave new meaning to the song, "I'll have a blue Christmas . . . ." The first year Nathanael and I were married, we bought a real tree on our limited budget and decorated with ornaments that barely survived the move to Brazil a year and a half later. And our first year in Brazil, we bought a tabletop juniper bush that blew over every time the wind came gusting through our ninth floor apartment windows. There went a few more ornaments! After that, it was all artificial for us. Last year, Nathanael inaugurated and celebrated the ultimate in artificial trees--a towering pre-lit tree given to us by my dad in Texas and hauled all the way back to Brazil.

This year, with our precious pre-lit packed away in Brazil, we were invited to join our family here in Illinois for the ultimate Christmas tree expedition. We loaded into three cars and drove an hour and a half to a Christmas tree farm. It was a frigid late afternoon, so we bundled up and huddled onto the horse-drawn wagon for a ride out to the field where we would scout out our very own tree.

Since Nathanael and I were in the market for a Charlie Brown tree, we didn't cut down our tree, but bought it on the lot near the entrance. However, we did participate in the search and sawing ceremony for the other two trees. When the final choice was made, the children, led by the Christmas tree elf (who looks a lot like my brother-in-law Stewart), skipped and danced around the tree before taking turns using the saw. We trudged back to the entrance where the trees were netted and loaded up since it was getting dark, and the farm was shutting down.

At home, we decorated our tree with lights, red ribbon, and paper snowflakes leaving plenty of room for our homemade Jesse Tree ornaments to be added day by day until Christmas. The tree is small and simple, humble and handmade--a good reminder that God came unto the least and not the greatest. He came to lift the sagging branches of even the most Charlie Browniest of us all . . . the ones sinking beneath the weight of the world, the sins of others, and especially their very own sin. And He did it by lifting Himself up onto a very different, very real tree. The Cross is, ultimately, at the heart of Christmas. The Cross is why He came.