Fruit Blossom Christmas Tree

I have always frustrated the ladies in my house, especially the young 'uns, with my unorthodox Christmas Trees.
First there was the National Forest tree, harvested in the hills above Ruedi Reservoir, and hauled home on the roof of the VW Beetle we drove exclusively back in the 80's. The problem was one of perspective, when I had gone off to harvest this tree by myself, leaving the young ladies home to help Mom bake Christmas cookies. I failed to have with me the proper female representation, which would have resulted in a proper tree.
Instead, I selected a little, stunted tree that was being blocked from any hope of sun by three enormous trees, that did not look as if they were going to retire anytime soon. This scrawny thing was immediately christened "Dad's Charlie Brown Christmas Tree" by our then 5 and 7 year old daughters.
The next year, I visited our local tree rancher, and bought a small, beautifully shaped Colorado Blue Spruce, and a huge plastic pot to plant it in. For several years, I got away with bringing "Mr. Christmas" into the house on a hand truck, padding it's container with all kinds of insulating blankets to keep it from thawing and waking up. To the annual cries of our children, I moved Mr. Christmas back outside before New Years Day, so it wouldn't lose it's seasonal rhythms and die when shoved back into the cold. Eventually, the tree got too big to bring indoors, so I gave it to some friends to plant in the backyard of their new house.
Since then, we've tried a fake tree nobody liked, and a rusty-metal Christmas Tree Sculpture, which was a story all its own.
Our daughters came home for Christmas 2007, and I had installed a completely new kind of Christmas Tree, which met, finally, with their complete approval. Haley and March are in their twenties now, and independent. They are also, as life experience would allow, more tolerant, maybe even appreciative of their Dad's quirky ways.
This Christmas Tree was a large branch from our backyard Apricot Tree, rigged into a bucket of water in the corner of the Living Room, and wired with strings of tiny red lights. It looked very artful, if I don't say so myself. The ladies all loved it. I was happy too, because I'd used a live tree branch that I was going to prune off this winter anyway, and the parent tree would live on, making new branches and new fruit every year.
Imagine our surprise, when two weeks after I had installed this Christmas Tree, flowering buds began to pop open all over the branches. In the next several weeks, the branch rewarded us with a full display of hundreds of Apricot blossoms. They filled the house with their beautiful spring aroma. (You can see a slideshow of the blossoms by clicking here)
For the rest of the winter, I gained a new perspective, and incentive, for pruning fruit trees. Our house became an arboretum, with vases in every room, sporting apple, pear, plum and cherry branches, all of them growing blossoms and/or leaves. Those with only leaves turned out to be from trees taking the 2008 season off from fruit production. A handy preview tool, these winter blossoms.
Would you like to have a blossoming Christmas Tree next winter? Stay tuned to this blog, where I will publish a way for us to get together and place local Holiday blossoms in as many homes as we can around here. We will also have our plans for this "Fruit Blossom Christmas Tree" sale on our Fat City Farms website:
http://www.fatcityfarms.org