If you love gardening you somehow manage to find a way to incorporate it into almost everything.
Some of the best-loved Christmas traditions, and festive dining ideas come from garden-related diversions. Like flower arranging, or making wreaths, and where do you think all those Christmas trees come from? Someone wanted the garden indoors. That is what I think, anyway. All those decorations and bulbs are stand-ins for blooming flowers. It all seems quite allegorical.
But maybe it’s just that people love to decorate with the beauty of nature! From vases of flowers and pots of plants to strewing pine and holly everywhere. It is quite an old idea, and even is found in the Bible roster of Jewish celebrations.
The harvest time of the feast of Tabernacles consisted of making outdoor “booths” festooned with leaves and fruits. In our winters, here, we don’t have as much plant material to work with from the garden, but there are lots of ideas that bring cheer to the gardener’s heart.
Thanksgiving is coming up, and it gives you a chance to fill baskets with gourds, and little pumpkins, and use some bittersweet sprigs to give the atmosphere of harvest plenty. It is just another way of bringing the outdoors in.
It is time, too, to give thought to indoor plants. Have you ever had a pot of narcissus blooms on your windowsill in the dead of winter? It is all the more exquisite for its rarity. Better than diamonds, but that is just the gardener in me talking…
Christmas arrives too soon after Thanksgiving, I think.
I used to like to make my own evergreen wreaths, and we used to travel to tree farms to cut our own trees. The years filled up our busy schedules and we haven’t done that for awhile.
Now I buy my wreaths at Sam’s club and my trees at the Anderson’s store.
It gets challenging to find a good fresh tree, sometimes, though. I will never forget a couple years ago when we had to completely take down the tree and get a new one of the week of Christmas- we were just too nervous about fire hazard. Besides the sad estate of our tree- it became the laughing stock “Charlie Brown” tree of the family.
Thankfully, we were at the end of season and they let us replace it free. But the extra work! You just don’t want to have to re-string all those lights!
If you cut your own tree, you know it’s fresh.
I have been trying to stock my aStore with handpicked suggestions for my website visitors. It is fun, but I never seem to have the luxury of time, anymore; plus I see so many things I would love to have.
It is like Christmas shopping, where you have to keep disciplined about buying for your giving. Otherwise, you would walk away with the store- everything is made to look so inviting, and you know you have been good all year…. 😉
Tags: holidays,decorating
