Christmas tree time at Spithandle Nursery

Ah, December. It’s an excuse for many things, but one family tradition that’s become well-established is an annual trip to Spithandle Lane to collect out Christmas tree. This year, we went earlier than I think we’ve ever been before, and I’m glad we did.

Both long-term readers of this site might remember that last year, our eldest was growing uncomfortable with picking a tree to be cut down. Well, this year we solves the problem by going nearly a fortnight earlier than we did last time. Happily, the barn was still absolutely full of cut trees this time around.

All we had to do was pick one…

There's something of a family split on trees. Three of us like as big as we can get, and one something nice and small. That’s shifting: one girl is drifting towards my wife’s “small tree” position, but the family outlier keeps us in line by taking a tape measure and the dimensions of the space we have for the tree.

Happily for my wallet, those dimensions mean we’re not looking at anything over the £40 trees, and the £30 are just fine too. All we have to do is agree on the right one. This year, the decision to go with a cut tree meant that we could say in the beautifully heated confines of the barn, rather than trudging through the fields in the teeth of Storm Darragh.

And after all the searching? A disagreement. And yes, it was between the girls. In the end, siblings will be siblings, and they disagreed on the tree they preferred. My wife had no strong opinion, and I just wanted both girls to be happy. So, no useful casting vote…

The eldest wanted this smaller one:

And the youngest wanted a larger, more vertically-shaped tree. We retreated to the wood burner and the sofas to drink hot chocolate, eat mince pies and thrash it out.

Inevitably, the more determined younger child got her way, and we ended up with the more expensive, slightly larger one. It gave better “Christmas vibes” apparently…

In her defence, it is a really nicely-shaped tree…

The return of the pony

One happy development: a pony again! The girls are now far too large to ride one, but they were more than happy to have the chance to pet the cute one that was in the barn:

Time for home (via dropping the eldest off for an afternoon with her school friends). The nice thing was that, on the way out, we were stopped by two members of the family to say “hello”. We may only see them once a year, but it’s been like that for nearly a decade (looking back at my photos, our first visit was in 2016, so this will be our 9th Spithandle tree), and so they’ve come to recognise us. And that matters to me. 15 years ago, when it was juts my wife and I, and we were looking for somewhere to live, a sense of community mattered to me.

And little things like this make me feel that we’ve found it here.