Photo and Commentary ©2025 by Shelley Schurch
Sunday, November 16, 2025
It seemed a bit early. We ate our breakfast with a chainsaw snarling loudly somewhere nearby. When we headed out on our post-meal walk we discovered a man dismantling a tree in our next-door neighbors’ backyard.
When we returned home he was higher up in the tree, having trimmed branches below him, and I snapped the photo you see here. I wanted to stay and watch how he was going to finish his task, but he worked slowly and methodically and I had a to-do list beckoning. I reluctantly left him to his work, minus my camera and my curiosity. As I moved about the house during the next three hours, the noise continued off and on, so he must have been trimming more than one tree.
It seems a bit early for another kind of tree trimming, since we are only half-way through November, but last night as we drove through our neighborhood we saw a Christmas tree shining in a living room window.
I am susceptible to walking down memory lanes during the holidays, and the sight of that tree took me back to my childhood Christmases. My parents and two older sisters and I would trudge through snowy woods belonging to a family friend in order to find the best possible tree, bring it home, and rearrange all the living room furniture to give it pride of place.
After my father secured it in its base, and festooned it with our big multi-colored lights, he carefully positioned a dozen or so fragile ornaments that were his favorites. Only then did he allow the rest of us to trim the tree. The final touch was something that seems to have fallen out of favor in recent decades – tinsel. It was painstaking work, at least the way we did it. There was no thought of tossing the tinsel haphazardly on the branches; we draped it, strand by strand, so that the finishing touch was one of balanced beauty. (Since we were thrifty folk, it was even more tedious to untrim the tree, since that meant removing each strand of tinsel, gathering it together without tangling it, and storing it with the ornaments until next December. We recycled without knowing the word.)
And yes, all this makes me think of Jesus.
“ . . . [He] who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness—by whose stripes you were healed. (I Peter 2:24 NKJV)
We were glad to see that our neighbors’ tree trimmer took no chances. He was wearing a hardhat, and boots with special grippers, and a safety harness. Every move he made was slow and deliberate, since missteps and accidents could be fatal.
In stark contrast, Jesus wore nothing and risked everything. He knew the consequences of the cross would be fatal. For him, that is; life-giving for us. The only “decoration” on His tree was His blood, staining the wood but gaining the victory.
A few of our neighbors are combining holidays on their front lawns. One in particular makes me shiver. A skeleton rising up twelve feet in the air has been joined by a large inflatable turkey. I’m waiting to see if they’ll clear the decks for Christmas, or simply add a Santa to the mix.
I’ve started combining holidays, too, though not on our front yard. I celebrate Christmas and Easter year round now. Jesus was born to die, but also to rise again, so that we, too, could rise to eternal life!