Holiday decor disappointment

My simple DIY holiday decorations keep getting harder and harder to create. For years, I did just fine with just one strand of outdoor lights, some festive ribbons, and some evergreen trimmings that I picked up for free from the local Christmas tree vendors in Sears' parking lot. I'd generally tip them a buck or two, but with all the rest of the decorations reused from year to year, it was still very cheap. And since I was only putting to use what would otherwise go to waste, it was very eco-friendly as well.

Two years ago, this got more difficult. Sears had gone into bankruptcy, and the Christmas tree vendors had stopped setting up shop there. And when I searched online to see where the nearest tree vendor was, it was about a twenty-minute drive away in an area we never visit for any other reason (and would particularly avoid visiting at Christmas time). Plus there was no guarantee they'd even have evergreen trimmings available when we got there. So I scaled down my decorations a bit and made do with what I was able to trim off the one evergreen tree in our yard and the bushes that overhung our driveway from the neighbor's yard.

But this year, that option too became unavailable. Our neighbor cut down all the bushes in his yard, and the one tree in our yard couldn't possibly yield enough greenery to make any sort of show. So at this point, we could think of three options:

• Make the trek up to the nearest tree vendor, with no guarantee of finding anything;
• Shell out for pricey greenery from a local store; or
  
• Don't put up decorations.

The first two options didn't seem very ecofrugal, but the last was just too depressing, particularly after a year with so little cheer in it. So I did a little research and found that I could get a 20-foot rope of pine garland at the local supermarket for 12 bucks — not as cheap as the greenery I used to pick up from the tree vendors, but still reasonably affordable. And I thought maybe the pine garland would justify its price by being easier to work with than the individual branches that had to be carefully trimmed and fitted and bound to the railings piece by piece.

This turned out not to be the case. The long, heavy rope of pine garland was actually more unwieldy than the branches; I had to use one hand to hold the end on the railing and one to tie the ribbon on while trying to pin the rest of the bundle in place so it didn't drag the piece I was working with off the railing. Also, 20 feet proved not quite long enough to go all the way up one railing, over the door, and down the other railing, so I had to hack off two lengths for the two railings — which was a lot harder than it sounds, because the pieces of pine were attached together with sturdy wire that I had to cut through,

But the biggest problem with the pine garland is that it just doesn't look as good as the ad hoc arrangements I used to make with miscellaneous evergreens. Because I was trying to work with a pre-made rope, I couldn't arrange the individual branches to cover over bare spots, so I was left with stretches of exposed wood with no greenery. Also, because I was trying to run the garland up one railing and down the other, the pine needles are all pointing in opposite directions on the two sides. And worst of all, the pine dries out a lot faster than the assorted branches of yew, spruce, cypress, and whatnot that I used to work with. It's only been up there for two weeks, and already it's starting to look brown and drab — not cheery and festive at all.

All in all, I can't really consider the $12 I spent on this pine garland to be money well spent. I'm not prepared to tear it all down, but I'm certainly not inclined to shell out another $12 for the same thing next year.

Fortunately, there may be other alternatives. For one, I discovered this year that there were Christmas tree vendors setting up shop at our local farmers' market, starting the Friday after Thanksgiving. They didn't seem to have a pile of discarded trimmings anywhere, but I could try going up to them next year and asking if they have any they'd like to get rid of. The downside of this plan is that, first, they might say no; and second, the farmers' market doesn't open until 11am on Friday, so if we tried to make it there the Friday after Thanksgiving we wouldn't be able to join the rest of the family in Hopewell until noon at least. We'd either lose out on a couple of hours of Thanksgiving fun or have to wait another week to get our decorations up.

But there is another possibility. My parents live on a half-acre lot with a whole bunch of spruce trees on it, and we could probably glean more than enough greenery from them to decorate our house without doing the trees any damage. And since we're always there for Thanksgiving weekend anyway, all we'd have to do is bring our clippers with us, and maybe some sort of bag to store the branches in.

If we could manage this, it would bring our holiday decorations back to their original ecofrugal roots. We'd be using only local, sustainably harvested evergreens, and paying nothing at all for them. And with our new battery-powered LED lights (running off rechargeable batteries) both outdoors and indoors, they'd be even more festive and easier to set up. The best of all ecofrugal worlds.