To be honest, we are going to be moving soon; however, we seem to have had the holiday tree up and down in a very organised fashion this year. Well, organised discounting the decoration boxes around. We got the tree around the 15th or so and brought it and most of the lights down on the 2nd.
Outside the back of our house is Riverview Park. It’s also a fairly steep drop into the park. Since we remove all the decorations from a natural tree; we always cast the tree into the woods down the hill from our house. It’s a nice “Return to nature”/”Circle of Life” gesture.
So, we removed the decorations. I had my son put the dropped branches and needles into a bag. We carried the tree to the back of the house and I tossed it down the hill. Before I tossed it, we pointed out where last year’s tree was. We could see that parts of it were still there and parts had begun to wear down and return to the Earth.
Amusingly, when I threw this year’s tree it bounced and landed right on top of the previous year’s tree like a long forgotten lover. My son asked why we didn’t just throw it out. I told him that the tree came from the ground and by giving it back to the ground new trees would come. And tried to explain the “Circle of Life” concept.
He took the remaining branches out of the back and threw them down the hill into the woods. I told him he could yell, “Back to Earth” as he threw them. This made him very happy. I told him by giving to the Earth it would be our way of saying Winter will give way to Spring and the days will get longer and soon we will see all the trees green again.
He seemed to understand this and it made me very happy.
The concept of religion is a very complex (and personal) thing in our household; so it was nice to be able to give our son a grounding in a love and respect of nature while not miring him in too much dogma.
Happy holidays and happy new year to all. May this new year as always exceed the past and give way to even better tomorrows.