As I write this, I am breathing in the familiar scent of the balsam fir, emanating from the nearly 7-foot tree, standing – albeit with a slight lean – in the corner of our living room.  It is hours before the first snowflakes of the first major snowstorm of the season are expected to fall, but closings and cancellations for the following morning are already scrolling across the TV screen. To quote the classic song, “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.”
My two roommates and I decided we were going to get a Christmas tree to spruce up our house for the holidays. We could have spent roughly $25 to buy a pre-cut tree on a lot or $45 at a cut-your-own operation. In an uncharacteristic bout of thriftiness, however, we decided to trek into the woods and cut down our own tree. It would be a hark back to my youth and the years when my family and I would hike through the snow and into the woods surrounding our home to cut down our tree.
Armed with a hatchet and a handsaw loaned to us by my roommate’s father, we made our way to the forests that yielded the trees of my youth. We had also hoped to borrow a truck, but when that fell through, we took enough rope to tie the tree to the roof of my roommate’s Jetta. With only 45 minutes until it would be too dark to see anything in front of us, my dad took pity on us and accompanied us to a spot with the best trees. Doubting our wilderness capabilities, he brought along a chainsaw.
We hadn’t walked far into the woods when we spotted a tall tree with a full top that we could chop down to size to fit in our house. We had pointed out several trees that caught our eye, but most of them were white spruce, otherwise known as cat spruce, my dad said. Apparently the trees have a very distinctive and unpleasant odor not unlike that of cat urine.
 With our minds made up, I started the cutting process with the handsaw, getting down a good rhythm, but not making much of an impact. Then my roommate unsheathed the hatchet from its protective leather covering and began hacking away at the trunk, laughing with each whack. As I moved back to avoid a chunk of flying wood from lodging in my eye, I thought she looked a little insane.         
By taking turns with the saw and the hatchet, we managed to get the tree down to an acceptable size. Rejecting my dad’s offer to bring the tree over later in the day in his truck, we threw rope over the tree and through the backseat windows of the car, tying a large knot where the two met. To secure the top of the tree, we threw a thinner rope across the roof and then shut the ends in the driver’s side and passenger’s side doors. The ends of the rope hung down in front of us and we clutched them in one hand as we drove, as if that would stop the tree from flying off the car.  
Getting the tree from the car to the house turned out to be easier than expected, but once we stood it up inside, we saw our measurements were slightly off. We would have to rethink the star at the top because the thin trunk was nearly touching the ceiling, not to mention branches shooting up like a crown surrounded it. Instead of pruning, we placed the star on a lower branch – less noticeable, but pretty, nonetheless.
The spindly trunk was too small for our tree stand and needed some doctoring. We tried wrapping cloth between the tree and the screws on the stand, but that didn’t work. We also tried anchoring the tree to a nearby doorknob with festive, gold ribbon and it appeared as though that might do the trick.
We wrapped the tree in garland and lights and hung simple, colored glass ornaments from its branches. On their own, the lights or the ornaments might not have looked so bad, but when done all together, the combination is frightening. We didn’t realize the string of lights had so many orange bulbs until we had them wrapped around the tree. Somehow the orange lights all ended up at the center of the tree. If you glance at them quickly, they resemble a giant fireball. It’s unlike any tree I ever had growing up, that’s for sure.
It was a shame we didn’t notice the tree stand was leaking before we put all the decorations on. When one of my roommates returned from the store with a smaller stand, we carefully untied the tree’s anchor and lifted it out of the old stand and into the new. The new stand seems to be effective, but I’m still expecting to come home some evening and find the tree on the floor.  
–Amanda Estes