Do you tree what I tree?

I was reminded this week when we bought our Christmas tree of the time my Dad and I got a BLM pass for $5 to chop down our own tree out in BLM land.

We went out in the red pickup with our saw and drove all over the hills to the south of St. George looking for an appropriate tree. We were out for about 3 hours and never could seem to find any that looked decent or that weren't 30 feet tall.

Finally as we had decided to give up we saw an adequate tree off the side of the road. We ran over and cut it down and tagged it proudly as if it were a 12-point buck and drove back home. But when we got home we realized the tree looked much smaller outside in nature than it did within the confines of a house, and that the tree was easily 13-14 feet tall.

So we started cutting branches and trunk off the bottom (this we did inside in the family room for some reason). But we really liked the bottom part of the tree and thought it would be a shame to cut off more of such a pretty portion of the tree. I don't remember if it was my idea or Dad's, but we decided 'why not cut off the top of the tree?'

So that's what we did, and we got the tree to fit. But we didn't trim the tree to shape it at all so we just had a tree that went up to about 2 inches shy of the ceiling and stopped, looking like if you went upstairs into the kitchen you'd see the top 3 feet of the tree poking through.

Smooth.