O' Christmas tree, O' Christmas tree

Every once in awhile a good idea will pop into one of our heads. We've been threatening to go cut a Christmas tree out back and lash it to the clothes line pole. Kris felt if we hung the bird feeders in it or near it the birds would use it for cover and we would get more bird traffic. Yesterday the new snow gave us enough Christmas spirit to go out back and look for a tree. It was'nt long before we found a great tree way out in the area we are clearing for pasture. Since it was doomed to be cut next spring, it was a good use for a nice tree. It was a rather large tree and a chainsaw would make this a lot easier. I have two chainsaws so I was hoping one would start although I could imagine neither starting and then an aggrevating and futile effort to coax one of them to go-- ending in a prolonged struggle to cut the tree with one of my dull handsaws.
Happily, the first saw I picked up started on the second pull. This really was a great morning. After we dropped the tree we grabbed it and started to drag it out to the skid trail. I say started because it was alot heavier than I had imagined and we had to kind of roll and pull at the same time to get it the 20 feet to the trail. Before we tugged on it I thought we could just drag it out to the barn, but it took the tractor.
Before long we had the tree tied to the pole with bailing twine. The tree was so heavy, turning it and looking for the best side wasn't even mentioned. We pulled up the birdfeeder poles and drove them into ground next to the trunk of the tree. As soon as we rehung the feeders and stepped back to look at our handy work, birds started to flock to the feeders. Up until then, 3 or 4 birds was all that ever worked the feeder at once. There must have been a dozen birds flitting from branch to branch and the feeders. From a distance the feeders looked like small Nativity scenes with birds hovering around them. It was instantly the best Christmas tree we had ever had or seen for that matter. I hadn't expected anything special and suddenly we had created a Christmas tree with living Christmas scenes held within its branches.
Kris added suet balls in colored mesh for ornaments and is making popcorn and cranberry garland to string around the tree. The birds are ecstatic and we are humbled by the success of a small effort to help them which turned out to be a huge Christmas gift to us.