Grow-your-own decor

For several years now, I've followed the same routine when it comes to seasonal decorations. In the fall, as soon as Jack-be-little pumpkins become available at the farmers' market, I buy three of them for $2 and deploy them on the steps of my front stoop. Those stay up until Thanksgiving weekend, when I stop by the Christmas tree vendors in the Sears parking lot and pick up a big bundle of trimmed-off branches for another buck or two. I bind the longest pieces to the railings of the front stoop with red-and-silver holiday ribbon, add a string of white LED lights, and use what's left of the greenery to make indoor arrangements in flowerpots. I've made some modifications to the indoor decorations in the past few years to make them cat-safe, but the basic decorating scheme has stayed the same. And in a typical year, I don't have to spend more than $5 on it.

But this year, this system ran into a snag. Two snags, actually. First the farmers' market didn't have any Jack-be-littles, so I had to buy them at the supermarket. That cost an extra dollar, but that was no big deal; the bigger problem was that the supermarket pumpkins, exposed to the elements, started to rot within a couple of weeks. I've never encountered that problem with the ones from the farmers' market; sometimes they'd be starting to look a little iffy by the time Thanksgiving rolled around, but I was always able to make them last until it was time to put up the Yuletide greenery. This year, I had to discard two of the three pumpkins well before Thanksgiving, and by that time the store was no longer selling them, so I couldn't replace them.

Then, over Thanksgiving weekend, when we stopped by the Sears parking lot to pick up our evergreens, we discovered that the Christmas tree vendors were no longer there. Even though our Sears store is one of the few in the country that's still in business, the vendors had apparently decided the traffic there wasn't good enough, so they'd left a sign saying that they'd moved to the parking lot of a Staples in Woodbridge, eight miles away. Eight extremely traffic-heavy miles in a direction we never travel normally.

We were reluctant to go that far out of our way solely for the evergreens, so instead, we decided to do a little hunting around the shopping centers in our area to see if we could find anyone else selling trees closer by. While shopping last Wednesday, we cruised through about half a dozen shopping center parking lots and found nothing. We also checked the prices of greenery at the Home Depot and Lowe's, thinking it might be worth paying a bit more for our evergreens if it saved us a stressful trip. They had some, but they were charging $10 for a small bunch less than half the size of the bundle we usually buy from the tree vendors, and probably not enough to decorate more than one of our railings.

So at that point, we decided to go to Plan C. Instead of finding a new tree vendor, we'd see how much greenery we could manage to trim off our own trees and bushes.

Now, since we cut down all the big bushes in front of our house, the only evergreen we have actually on our property is a largish cypress in the back yard, squished up between the garden fence, the back fence, and the shed. However, there's also a cypress in our next-door neighbor's yard that hangs over the fence into our driveway, which puts us within our rights to trim the bits that are encroaching on our property. We were also able to trim off some branches of their yew bushes that were sticking through the fence.

So, between those two and the one in the back, we were able to amass a fairly reasonable collection of greenery, using our recycling bin as a container. The only problem was that it didn't have many of the longer branches that are most useful for attaching to the railings. I could have used a whole bunch of the shorter ones, but it would have been a lot more difficult to tie them on securely. So I opted to decorate only the front railings this year and skip the side porch.

On the plus side, the yew and cypress branches were much less prickly than the spruce and fir we tend to acquire from the tree vendors, so the process of securing them to the railings was much more comfortable than it usually is. I even snipped off some long branches from our rosemary plants to twist through through the lights and cover up the bare wire.

And there was plenty of greenery left over to fill all the vases in the house and make my little flower-pot arrangements for the tops of bookcases. I was even able to make more dramatic displays for the downstairs rooms, with the help of a couple of extra rolls of ribbon I bought last year.

The moral of this little story, I would say, is "Use what you have." Many people, finding themselves unable to buy cheap greenery from the Christmas tree vendors, would have assumed their only option was to pay the inflated prices for it at Home Depot and other home stores. (For that matter, many people would never have thought to get greenery from the tree vendors in the first place; they would have just shelled out $18 for a roll of fresh pine garland every year.)

But for us ecofrugal folks, it makes much more sense to follow the "buyerarchy" outlined in a recent post in the Frugal forum on Reddit. If you need something, instead of running out to the store, first check to see if you can make do with what you have. If you can't, work your way through other options such as borrowing, swapping, thrifting, or making your own. Only if all else fails should you actually have to shell out cash for something new.