KOSCIUSKO — My children have always been great volunteers!  

I volunteer mama to bake cookies, I volunteer mama to raise some money, I volunteer mama to get our class Christmas tree this year.  See what I mean, always quickly to volunteer MAMA!  

I have baked enough cookies to give the “Elves” a run for their money.  I have begged for needed funds so many times that merchants and businesses hide their checkbooks when they see me coming towards them.  However, today I want to tell you about the time I was volunteered by my daughter to deliver a Christmas tree to her class room the day before they would decorate.  I’m working on a deadline here, the day before?  There’s no body in town selling trees, no Christmas tree farm, we don’t have our land for me to cut one, so here I am not going to disappoint my child so I go to plan B.  I picked up my sister, her child is also in the same room so I figure she had an obligation here, so we go hunting a small Christmas tree.

We don’t have a saw.  All we have is a little small axe.  I believe it’s called a hatchet and it belonged to my son the Boy Scout.  We start riding down the road going toward Possumneck.   We’re looking for one close to the road as we don’t believe we can scale a barbed wire fence very easily.

We realize, also that we will be appropriating (we’d never call it “stealing”) this tree from someone else’s land.  We also realized it could be some criminal activity involved.  But, we had to have a tree so we were willing to assume this liability.  We probably drove north for thirty minutes looking for the perfect tree.  After thirty minutes of searching, we were looking for a TREE.  We would take lopsided, no limbs on one side, crooked, whatever, just a tree. We finally turned back toward home and began looking again.  We had seen one on our way by earlier but at the time we were still searching for perfect and it was rather sparsely filled with cedar boughs.  Now, after looking for so long, it really didn’t look quite so bad.  As a matter of fact, it looked flawless.

We parked my car, a small Lincoln, and took our “axe” in hand and clambered up the slippery hill.  I forgot to tell you it had been misting rain all morning.  Not much traffic at this time of day so maybe we could chop down the tree hurriedly and through it inside my trunk and get away before anyone knew the better.

The rain is beginning to fall more steadily now and we are soaked, our hair stuck to our heads and our clothes soaked.  I began the chopping first, my sister trying to hold back the sparse limbs so that I could hit the crooked trunk with my weapon.  I hit at that tree for several minutes with not a niche hewed out of the base of that little tree.

So, now my sister is going to show me how to cut a tree??? Okay.  I hold the branches and she tried.  Still, no notches coming out of the tree.

All of a sudden she jumps into the tree and “rides” it to the ground and says “chop Peggy Jo.”  So, with the desire of a lumberjack I began to swing the hatchet and we almost have it chopped, broken, splinted  from the ground and a pickup truck stops in front of my car.  She lets the tree go and it just lays there on the ground like a pitiful bundle of cedar limbs.  He asked if he could help us and we said “No thanks, we think we have it now.”

He asked if we were sure and we assured him we were.

We dragged the tree down the hill, mud clinging to the scrubby branches and threw it into the back of my little car.  The trunk would not shut, even as small as the tree was, my trunk was smaller.  So, we wrapped the bottom of the tree in a blanket I had in my car and opened my sunroof and wedged the top of the tree through the small space my sister held onto the tree and we drove over to the middle school, tree slinging mud from its branches as we drove and carried the tree inside.

When we walked into the room, you would have thought we were caring the Whitehouse Christmas Tree as the kids began shouting and clapping.

We were so proud of ourselves until I related the story to my husband.

He said what kind of pickup truck pulled up at the place of the “crime”?  I told him and he told me who the man was.  I was horrified!

We had been on Mr. H. T. Green’s property and this was one of his sons.  We had procured the tree from the Greens’ land.  I called later and apologized.  I was so thankful they got a laugh out of it and the authorities were not called!



Room Mother Sugar Cookies   

1 c. butter, 2 c. confectioners’ sugar, 4 c. flour, 1 t. vanilla

Mix well and form into walnut size balls and flatten with a fork.  Bake

350 degrees until brown.