Barmy Blue's Bland Blog

A cuute teaaddyy beear

Four calling birds
Three French hens
Two turtle doves
And a partridge in a pear tree.

So, Onion rings?......I need to clean my glasses.

When I was little I had a cassette tape (shows how old I am) of Micky Mouse and friends singing Christmas songs. My favourite is the Twelve Days of Christmas because individual characters get a certain part of the song. The “human” singing the lead in all of the songs has the partridge, Mickey has the doves and so on. Five rings is sung by Goofy and at one point instead of singing “five golden rings” he shouts “five ONION rings” and laughs. I always found that funny. I should still have that tape buried somewhere in the house. I wonder if I can dig it up. It could be anywhere though and I wouldn’t even know where to start.

Additional news.
Anyone ever wondered about my mum’s Christmas tree?
Well. We found the problem.
The trunk snapped. So no hope of recovery. We suspect the main culprit to be ivy that was left too long and matured into a tree. It’s really really tough.
I have hope that he can grow a shoot from his trunk and still survive but since it was autumn it wasn’t really prime growing season for trees.
I took several cuttings, got some rooting powder and am seeing if they grow. I’m very doubtful but at least this will help me to accept the loss of that lovely old tree.
We still haven’t recovered the end that snapped because it was too hard to get out so we sawed through it at a point that we could reach. Hat to cut of a lot of lower branches and finally managed to get him stood up.
Now. I mentioned earlier that I’d put him in a bucket. That’s not entirely true. I’m using it as a bucket but it’s actually a bin. When I was younger we had a bin. Just a regular round bin. Quite some time ago now, the council introduced wheelie bins, bigger more convenient and relatively fox proof. So since then our old bin, because of course we wouldn’t get rid of it, has been sat at the back of the garden just growing moss and not bothering anyone.
So I went and rinsed that off, carried it through the house to the back garden and managed to put the tree in it. It was too high and the tree too heavy to lift into the bin so I tried to use a little physics to lever it up from a sideways position. Of course a limited understanding of physics alone can’t make up for lack of upper body strength or two pairs of arms. Luckily mum came home about that time so I got her to help me. I didn’t like leaving the lovely branches I’d had to cut off so stuffed those into the bin too, rather like flower arranging but with a tree, to bush out the bottom, then filled it with water.
The tree, being allowed to grow wild, is lopsided and looks quite sad but he looks a Hell of a lot better than he did laying on the floor waiting to rot. He’s a stubborn creature. He’s still green, mostly. He’s definitely a credit to his species. I’m thinking that when he does finally die completely we might put him out for Christmas tree collection with this year’s Christmas tree. It’ll be sad to see him go but at least he’d be going with a companion.
Now you might think it odd to put a tree in a bin but It was actually pretty nostalgic.
When I was little we had a large bucket and I mean large. This can hold a couple of gallons easily. And we’d get some bricks out of the garden (don’t forget my dad’s a builder so we had about 7 or so left over from something he did out there) we’d sweep of the dirt and bugs. Leave them aside to dry if need be then, when it was time, carefully stack them in the bucket. Saw off more branches than mum thought were necessary because don’t forget it’s a bucket so it’s very high. Place the tree. Line some more bricks around it to keep it steady. When it was finally steady fill it with water and put a gold wrap around the bucket to make it more festive because it’s just a plain black bucket.
Then one year we got a stand. The bucket was fine it’s just that it was a lot of effort. But the stand we got was a nightmare. I vaguely remember mum having to hammer a plastic bit into the bottom of the tree and it being very hard to do and having to use a chisel and complaining that this was supposed to be easier but it was harder. In the end it worked out but never again. Next year, I think, we got a better stand and I think that’s the one we still use.
So a Christmas tree in, what is essentially a big pot, is not alien to me in the slightest.
In fact, when I was in nursery school we had to paint a Christmas tree and because the bucket was so iconic I took up about a third of the paper just painting a bucket. Had to be brown though because we didn’t have black. But I made the tree too big too and suddenly realised that I’d run out of paper so I couldn’t put a star on top. I was disappointed so I just painted a yellow line at the top in place of a star. It’s actually still on the wall. I see it every day.