Cut Free

Years and years ago, when the kids were very young (15 years ago, at least), I dressed the kids up, stood in line to see Santa, and fitfully got through the ordeal. Santa handed each kid a seedling, and me being me, I came home and planted each in a small pot and nursed them until they were big and strong enough to transfer to a bigger pot. And so on. Months turned to years, we moved, and the small trees came with us. Eventually, we planted them in the ground, and they grew too big for that space, too, and required another transplanting.

The trees have been growing in our backyard ever since, not quite "making sense" there, but meaningful and significant to our family story, none-the-less.

Woohoo didn't come home for Thanksgiving this year, and that meant our annual tradition of going out and cutting down a Christmas tree, the day after Thanksgiving, would be different. We decided this would be the year we'd cut down one of the backyard Santa trees, and use it for Christmas. It's crowded where it is, it's grown too big to fit where once it did.

This was Woohoo's tree, and much the same way, she has grown beyond the limiting space she had in the home, and it is time to be cut loose. In five short months she will graduate from college and be on her own. She is not the little girl that got the seedling from Santa, nor is she the grown woman she will one day be, but she is ready to stand on her own, light her own way, and shine.