There are a myriad of ways to get rid of your tree. In Lake Havasu, AZ, the BLM drops trees (weighted?) into their man-made lake to create fish habitat. (I first read that little tidbit in a magazine, but I found a YouTube video.) Probably the fastest (and most popular?) way is to put the thing through the wood chipper. Drew's bright idea for the year was to burn ours. I have to tell you, Drew's rather fond of the ol' fireplace. It's terrible for providing heat to the house, but it's his first choice in getting rid of sensitive information and for minimizing some of the trash that has to go down to the curb every week. So as he's clipping all the branches off and throwing heaps of the stuff into the fireplace and it's going up in flames *fast*, we're starting to think, this is a really bad idea. At one point, there was a little explosion as some of it seemed to spontaneously explode into flames: it was that dry and brittle! Of course there were needles and little branches scattered everywhere so that I could almost picture the whole living room catching on fire. I'm not one for alarm, but that was certainly a very instructive lesson on how large-scale forest fires start. I think next year we'll bundle ours into the community wood chipper like normal people.03 January 2008
The Christmas Tree Bonfire
We took our Christmas tree down last night. Normally, we try and leave it up until the Epiphany (this year 6 Jan), but the thing was getting so dry, it was kind of dangerous. It was visibly dry after Christmas, but we thought we could stretch it at least another week. We bought from Lowe's and who knows where they shipped that tree in from, i.e. how long had it been cut till we got it. For your information, just because we're almost entirely surrounded by trees here, doesn't mean you can go cutting trees down willy-nilly on federal and state land, although, I know over at the AFB, you can cut down trees on their land for $5, provided you're a military member. Anyway as I was prying the ribbon and ornaments off – the branches had dried hanging down, trapping things within: the kind of spruce that we bought is not particularly good for hanging heavy ornaments and it doesn't smell very nice –, I realized maybe we waited a little too long.
There are a myriad of ways to get rid of your tree. In Lake Havasu, AZ, the BLM drops trees (weighted?) into their man-made lake to create fish habitat. (I first read that little tidbit in a magazine, but I found a YouTube video.) Probably the fastest (and most popular?) way is to put the thing through the wood chipper. Drew's bright idea for the year was to burn ours. I have to tell you, Drew's rather fond of the ol' fireplace. It's terrible for providing heat to the house, but it's his first choice in getting rid of sensitive information and for minimizing some of the trash that has to go down to the curb every week. So as he's clipping all the branches off and throwing heaps of the stuff into the fireplace and it's going up in flames *fast*, we're starting to think, this is a really bad idea. At one point, there was a little explosion as some of it seemed to spontaneously explode into flames: it was that dry and brittle! Of course there were needles and little branches scattered everywhere so that I could almost picture the whole living room catching on fire. I'm not one for alarm, but that was certainly a very instructive lesson on how large-scale forest fires start. I think next year we'll bundle ours into the community wood chipper like normal people.
There are a myriad of ways to get rid of your tree. In Lake Havasu, AZ, the BLM drops trees (weighted?) into their man-made lake to create fish habitat. (I first read that little tidbit in a magazine, but I found a YouTube video.) Probably the fastest (and most popular?) way is to put the thing through the wood chipper. Drew's bright idea for the year was to burn ours. I have to tell you, Drew's rather fond of the ol' fireplace. It's terrible for providing heat to the house, but it's his first choice in getting rid of sensitive information and for minimizing some of the trash that has to go down to the curb every week. So as he's clipping all the branches off and throwing heaps of the stuff into the fireplace and it's going up in flames *fast*, we're starting to think, this is a really bad idea. At one point, there was a little explosion as some of it seemed to spontaneously explode into flames: it was that dry and brittle! Of course there were needles and little branches scattered everywhere so that I could almost picture the whole living room catching on fire. I'm not one for alarm, but that was certainly a very instructive lesson on how large-scale forest fires start. I think next year we'll bundle ours into the community wood chipper like normal people.