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One of my favorite Christmas traditions has always been the drive on the first weekend in December to the tree farm. It began almost fifty years ago when my parents took my brother and me every year to a wonderful place called Limberlost, a large acreage of land on which several different types of pines grew specifically for families like us to take home to enjoy during the holidays. We were never satisfied to simply pick the first one we saw, so we trudged every inch of the farm in search of The Perfect Tree.

It has been the same for my husband and I and our children. Until it closed a few years ago, The Holiday Barn was our family's special place to find our Christmas tree. We would walk all over the farm looking for the right tree, continuing our search until we knew we had found exactly what we were looking for. After cutting it down, waving our saw was the signal to the tractor driver that we were ready for the ride back to the Barn, where hot apple cider and cocoa awaited us.

Because of the special activities leading up to our Christmas Holiday, it was, and still is, hard to put it all away for another year. Taking down the tree is no exception, no matter how dry it is by that time. Unfortunately, the excitement of decorating the tree doesn't carry over to the removal of the ornaments and hauling the tree out the door. I'm usually the one who takes care of it all, and most years I wait until way into January. One year it was the first weekend of February before we finally got the tree out of the living room. The condition of the tree by that time was less than desirable, and any movement whatsoever caused a multitude of brown needles to drop all over the floor on the way out the front door.

In the early years of our marriage, my husband would come up with a new idea each year for tree disposal. The most memorable one (and most foolish) was to leave the tree in place and cut off each limb, throwing it into the fireplace. Of course, the tree was so dry the limbs exploded when they hit the flames and we had long tongues of fire leaping several feet out of the fireplace. Neighbors also reported seeing flames jumping out of the top of our chimney. That option was immediately marked off the list of possibilities, and he went back to the previous year's solution - throwing the tree out the back door. There it would remain until our annual leaf burning ritual, when he again would try fire to rid us of the tree carcass. After lying on the

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