2/04/09 CHRISTMAS TREES AND HARD TIMES

Wednesday, 8:30 AM. 0 degrees, wind W, calm. The skies are overcast and the barometer predicts partly cloudy skies.
The balsam fir, Abies balsamea, is the evergreen most often sold as the Christmas tree. It is a tree of northern mixed forests and the far northern boreal forest and high mountainous regions having a similar cool, damp climate. It is native to the Bayfield area and much of northern Wisconsin. It will not do well in warm and dry locations. It can be a quality landscape tree under the right conditions but is probably better used for naturalizing. As a young tree its appearance is rather similar to the spruces, but as it matures it becomes very narrowly conical, almost spire-like, as is the tree pictured, which is perhaps fifty feet tall. These spires can be picked out in the native landscape from a very long distance. Close up, its needles are soft and flat, laying horizontal on young branches and some curling upwards on older branches. The name balsam is derived from the aromatic sap (that’s why they smell so nice indoors as Christmas trees). Spruce needles are stiff and sharply pointed, and being triangular in cross section an individual needle can be rolled between the thumb and forefinger. Other conifer needles will not roll in that way.
There are other spruce and fir trees to talk about, and I will do so as I come across them (may take a while as the snow is almost impossible to get around in without putting on snow shoes).
With times getting tougher and tougher I keep remembering things my mother used to do to conserve what she called her “pennies.” One thing she did was to save bacon fat for cooking, and believe me it is better for frying eggs than anything else. She saved bacon fat, lard and any other fat to make soap. She cooked the fat on the stove, added lye (you can make your own lye by steeping wood ashes in water) and cooked it down to a pudding-like mass and put it in small cake tins to cool. For many years she used nothing else to wash clothes with, it was strong good stuff and cost almost nothing. Joan’s mother did the same for many years. Mother also used cold bacon grease instead of butter on bread when she could. I’ve been trying it, and with salt and pepper it is delicious. When she was a child on the farm, and Joan’s mother also, the butter was always sold, so bacon grease was the “butter” of the farm family. Didn’t hurt them, won’t hurt me either (Joan won’t eat it, says times aren’t quite that bad yet).