A visit to the tree lot

No news on the job front. Today’s second interview went well (I thought.) But then, all the interviews I’ve attended in this round of job-hunting have been good in my opinion.

We got our Christmas tree this evening. Yesterday afternoon Jim and I went to the tree lot to take a look at the trees. See, they don’t post prices. You have to go to the lot and ask. They have tree lots everywhere, but these aren’t exactly things that are advertised, so you have no idea if the lot across the street is charging less than the lot that you’re at. Then you factor in the cold – no one wants to be out for extended amounts of time in this temperature. I was a little nervous about this sort of marketplace, assuming that the trees were priced based on the sort of car you drove up in, and the shoes you were wearing. I think maybe I’m paranoid, and that the tree people change the prices as we get closer to Christmas. After we came home for the evening, we realized that we had forgotten to go back to the tree lot and pick out a tree. So we had to go back today. (Of course, I was curious to see if the price had mysteriously changed overnight. It didn’t.)

They sell trees here differently from the way we do in Hawaii. Back home, they have these refrigerated containers that the trees sit in at night. In the daytime they haul a bunch of trees out of the container to sell to people. They cut the strings off and fluff them out so that people can look at them. And then when people select their trees, they run them through a netting chute, which makes the tree easy to transport.

This is my second tree in Calgary. Last year we put it off to almost the last minute and we ended up getting it at home depot. They don’t cut the string off the trees there so you have to spin the tree around, looking for bare spots through the squished up branches. We ended up with a nice tree, but I couldn’t really understand deciding on a tree without actually seeing it.

Tonight’s tree lot visit was neat – all the trees are unstrapped and fluffed out, so you totally know what you’re getting into. This tree lot made it easy on us – I guess they only order one height range of their trees, so most all the trees were one price. AND they stand on these neat metal stands so they aren’t smashed up against each other. We ended up getting a Scottish Pine tree, which I have dubbed “Scotch Tape Pine.” No photos yet. It’s still sitting in a bucket of water, having some pre tre-stand drinkies.

The best part of the tree-lot visit? The tree vendor wished us a Merry Christmas.

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