Putting up the Christmas tree

Hello, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Our new old house, built about 1870, has eleven-foot ceilings downstairs, the upstairs a measly nine feet. Of course, all the heat is high up in the rooms; the warmest place is on the seventeenth step going upstairs, but those high ceilings are fun at Christmas. For a long time, people near us grew Eastern Red Cedars, and we’d go a farm to get our tree. We had a bamboo pole as tall as the ceiling to get a tree tall enough. Then came putting it in the stand, a heavy-duty one that held water. Eastern Red Cedars are a little prickly, so there were some not merry words exchanged between Edward and me. One year, the tree fell over, not much damage, but that necessitated guy wiring it to the moldings.