This is only 18 days late, but it is so funny that I thought I would still share the photos. We had a lovely little Christmas tree that was less than 5ft tall and fit our 580 sq ft apartment nicely. Nice while we’re in the month of December that is…

As soon as Christmas is over, there’s this primal need to get that shit out of the house. I don’t know what it is but it makes my skin crawl, I just want everything gone.

Getting rid of our small tree proved to take some planning and thought.

Our apartment complex didn’t offer tree recycling and prohibited tree dumpster dumping and we don’t have a car. It took A LOT of searching before I found a place we could drop off the tree and it proved to be .8 of a mile away. I really tried envisioning us walking down a highly shopped street waiving a tree around for almost a mile and couldn’t see this happening, unless we went a block out of our way to avoid foot traffic.

Nope. More pondering ensued and I decided to take a Dexter like approach to the Christmas tree. Morbid much? Yup. I haven’t even watched Dexter since the 2nd season. What tool should I use? It sounded like a job for something out of our kitchen or camping box.

When we first got the tree, we had to take the bottom 1/2″ off so it could drink water and I tried these cheap camping saws that fold out, our new $4 bread knife, and even our camping axe, but none of these worked well. With a little muscle and clenched teeth we got through that bit. Another pro-tip, do this over a tarp at least that way you can shake it outside or out your window (we’re on the first floor). Needles and saw dust can get everywhere.

Then the light bulb moment happened, I remembered that a saw came in the bottom of our camping axe. That’s what you see in my hand and I’m so glad I remembered this. It made things SO much easier. I donned my kitchen gloves, so tree sap and and tree didn’t stick to my hands and finally found a good knife/saw to cut through the tree.

Piece by piece and branch by branch the tree came down. The lovely evergreen branches fit nicely in a garbage bag and the tree trunk itself mischievously or er mysteriously  ended up in the dumpster.

Almost done and I didn’t even break a sweat. The whole process took about 30 minutes.

 

I then cut the ‘stem’ in half and Jeremy hauled all the bits out to the garbage. Bye bye tree!

xoxo