This past Saturday we set off on one our our favourite holiday traditions, the family search for our Christmas tree. I have always loved getting the tree, and some of my favourite Christmas memories are of getting trees with my family as a child. Willy and I have continued the tradition of decorating real trees, and have historically taken the family to precut tree lots. Had we been in Canada this year, we were going to go to a “cut your own lot” for a new twist!
Being new to Bangalore, I didn’t really know where to look for trees. I wasn’t even sure that there would be Christmas trees of any sort available, given that the population is very much non-christian. Happily, there are a number of decorations in the stores, including some fake trees. We were more interested in a little tree that would be kept (alive) in a pot and available for planting at a later date, so we started looking at alternatives to traditional pines. Tops of my list were either a Christmas hibiscus, or a Christmas palm tree. We found what was reported to be a large nursery and set off.
The nursery was actually in the middle of Lal Bagh Gardens, a massive and beautiful park just south of the downtown core. We spent a couple of hours wandering around admiring the trees, flowers, and wildlife. It really is an amazing park that I want to go visit some more. It was about an hour from our house, but we packed a picnic lunch and had a nice time.
The visit concluded with a trip to the nursery. We had two tired lils, but the promise of a Christmas tree perked them up, and soon they were running around and goofing off among the plants. After our first pass, we found some flimsy palms, and no hibiscus trees. I wasn’t sure the palms were going to cut it, so I wandered a little deeper, and found the perfect little tree! It’s about four feet tall, and a smidge Charlie Brown. It has soft, short needles, and branches that will be strong enough to hold whatever we come up with for ornaments. It is a pine, but a more tropical type of pine, one that is seen growing in some places in Bangalore, including one on our street! Near as I can tell, it is a “Cook Pine”, also known as the Christmas tree pine. Fitting.
The lils loved it so much that we needed to get them each smaller versions. So we now have three trees, ready for some decorating. They aren’t quite the tropical tree that I envisioned, but the will do just fine!
