Tree Fires

and put some water in the stand!

Artificial trees look very nice these days and are made from fire retardant materials. Mine has LED lights built in.

My Christmas tree is still out in the woods. Maybe I'll go visit today. It's 195 feet high, wouldn't quite fit in the house.

What kind of tree? At that height, I suspect it is a Douglas Fir.

:-)

That one is a ponderosa pine.

For circumference, a larch has it beat:

Awsome pictures!

My favoriet two pine trees are ponderosa and jefferies.

A questions for you on your ponderosa: butterscotch or vanilla?

Yes, I can resist sniffing them.

Smells like a p. pine to me... In '89 I worked on a nature trail the Forest Service was building. One of the stops was a pine and the descriptive brochure said it smelled live vanilla so that's the official story.

While brushing out the trail I came across a hawthorn. I have a particular distaste for that specie so I fired up the Stihl and cut it to the roots.

A couple of days later the ranger in charge of the project gave me a copy of the proposed trail guide. 'Er, Annie, we've got a little problem with the stop at the hawthorn.' I couldn't find another hawthorn anywhere near the trail so we skipped that one.

I never understood hawthorn jelly unless the British version has more taste than the Doughlas hawthorn. Those berries re all seed and no taste. They're similar enough to service berries to try to ambush me but I approach carefully checking for thorns.

Those C7 and C9 incandescent lights do get hot. Also, LED light colors don't fade. This Christmas I have only one C9 incandescent (Rudolph's nose) and it's outside.

They are. The light from most LEDs is actually that color, not "dirty yellow" (usually called white) filtered through paint that comes off and looks bad.

I really don't like "pre-lit" trees. It deprives you of creativity (decorating).

It has a well distributed lighting pattern and you can have a solid color, multi color, or changing at random. All the creativity I need. Oh, my stand rotates too.

We cut our own trees at Christmas tree farms. Most have a drill that will ensure your tree will stand up straight, regardless of what the trunk is doing - as long as you have a stand like the one shown below. With this type of the stand you can rotate the tree (manually) as you decorate it.

When you get home, you just plunk the tree on the spike and start decorating. No thumbscrews, clamps or anything. Just Plunk!

After a lightining strike here, the entire tree almost disappears (except for a few branches and leaves).

--

Whole lotta nature going on here...

A double rainbow framing mountain top lightening strikes

but I get to actually position the lights, and that is an important part of Christmas.

BTW, I used to have one of those rotating stands. It would make a sound like someone snoring (IIRC once every time it went around).

I made a service call long ago and found that an underground wire was bad. The farmer told me about an old timers' story that said lightning would bore holes in the ground. It turned out that's what happened. The lightning strike bored a hole that went down to the bad underground wire and stopped there. The corn was still mostly green except for some stalks right around the hole. The same thing happened at another farm a few years later.