Lessons from cutting Down the Annual Christmas Tree

My daughter, Kerri, and I had a tradition of cutting down the annual Christmas tree. As I fondly thought about it, I decided that the annual trek to the Christmas Tree farm had lessons that we could all learn from.

1. Don’t settle for the first good-looking tree. Kerri was always eager to get the tree selection done quickly in order to get home and start the decorating, not realizing that the secret to a great Christmas tree begins with the selection. A well-decorated Charlie Brown tree is still a Charlie Brown tree. Short-cutting the selection process gets people in trouble their whole life. Selecting the first guy that shows a girl a little attention is a sure-fire way to end in divorce court. A management text calls it “satisficing” – selecting the first solution that meets the minimum criteria instead of going for the best. Take your time and wait for the best.

2. A big tree in the outdoors is a gargantuan tree in your living room. I was guilty of this more times than I’d like to admit. The tree needs to be selected in reference to the size of the room it is going in – not the room in which it currently sits. Reference is everything. Compared to Bill Gates, I’m a pauper. Compared to most of the people in the world, I’m Bill Gates. Never lose perspective.

3. It is cold, windy (sometimes raining) and generally miserable cutting down your own tree, but it is worth it. Christmas tree cutting is a wintertime activity and winter in Indiana can be miserable. Rarely has it been a nice day when we cut down a tree. But when the time came for the next tree cutting, I forgot the miserable weather we endured last year, eager again to beat the elements in the quest for the ideal Christmas tree. Anything and everything in life worth having is a struggle to achieve. The easy-to-obtain things in life and the mundane are easily forgotten.

4. The simple things in life are usually the most memorable. This seems contradictory to the last lesson, doesn’t it? Not really. Simple and easy are different. When you think about the act of going to a Christmas tree farm and cutting down a tree, it is a pretty simple task and yet for us it brings back the best of memories. This is different than standing in line for hours for the “must have gift”. It’s not complicated, nor hard to plan. It is just the simple act of spending time with a child and creating a Christmas tradition that lives on in our memories.

5. Don’t forget the saw. Failing to plan is planning to fail. Simple does not mean it requires no forethought. A few minutes of planning saves the long trip back to get the saw.

6. Natural trees aren’t perfect and perfect trees aren’t real. Natural trees smell good and look good, but they do not look perfect. If you want perfection you want artificial. That’s the way it is with people. The prefect people you see on the screen aren’t real and the real people in your life aren’t perfect.