A Tree for Christmas

The sounds of the birds chirping, the kettle whistling and sausages sizzling on the open fire, the smell of coffee wafted across my nose, waking me from my slumber. Yawning and stumbling out of my dirt-packed, fur-lined bed I heard father chatting merrily to mother.

“It’s just a few more weeks until Christmas time. What do you reckon we get ourselves a tree from the forest?”

“Yes, of course. Christmas should be a special event this year.” Mother replied.

Getting up, especially in the midst of winter had been hard, considering just how cold the weather was. But after hearing about an outing, to the forest nonetheless, it had woken me and I bounded into the front room.

“We’re going to get a tree?” I asked, hoping that I’d heard right. Mother nodded, smiling merrily beside the fire.

“First, go wake up Alexandru, then we’ll have some of your mother’s delicious sausages and finally, we’ll travel by sled to find a tree in the forest,” Father explained.

The five of us, Father, Mother, Alexandru (younger brother), Paula (older sister), and me, Rica, bundled up in our sleds and headed off towards the welcoming white forest. Leaving the sled on the edge of the forest, we left to walk on foot.

Finding a tree was easy. The problem was finding the ‘it’ tree.

 “How about this one?” Alexandru would say from time-to-time. The answer would always be “too tall”, “too short”, “too thin”, “too wide’ etc., there was always a reason why this tree or that tree wasn’t the ‘perfect’ tree for us.

Walking deeper into the forest, we found a clearing, so we decided to have some of Mother’s homemade thick soup. It was a pleasant meal after the cold weather and it filled our stomachs. After lunch Father decided that it was a nice day so we could have a mock snowball fight. At first, we split into two teams, making our team forts, etc., but then someone, probably Paula, the cheeky one, three a snowball at me, her own teammate. And that started it.

It was an outright war between everyone, with no one on your side.

“Argh! Stop it!”

“Ouch! You got me!”

Joyful squeals could be heard from the clearing where we played, rising and falling like a crescendo and decrescendo in music, then slowly and finally one by one, each voice dying down until all that was heard was the tired panting. The birds’ resumed their merry chirping, like it was the beginning a new movement in the song.

Faces red and energy spent, we decided to round back to our sled. Looking at my siblings’ faces, I saw that my face probably mirrored their own. Dejection. After a fun filled day, we still hadn’t found our tree.

Because we’d taken another route on the way back, it took less than half the time it took to get there than to get back. I was looking ahead and finally spotted our sled a few hundred metres away.

Just as I was about to point it out, Paula suddenly exclaimed, “Our tree! Our tree! That’s our tree!” Following her gaze, we saw a tree standing a little to the right of our path. It was standing in between two massive trees but wasn’t as big as them, nor as small as some of the surrounding trees. It was perfect. Not too big, and not too small, not too wide nor too thin either. I breathed. It really was our perfect Christmas tree.

Father reached for his axe and began chopping down the tree, then as a family, we used all the leftover energy we had to drag the tree back to our sled. Just before starting for home, Mother decided that we should all take a photo to remember this convivial event.