Sitka or Bust: Commute The World

This weekend was the first weekend in a long time I haven’t spent working. You might be able to tell purely because I haven’t posted in quite some time and you were pretty much done even hoping for a notification in your inbox about this site. I apologize for that. Juggling hasn’t been working out for me lately. But because things are dying down a bit lately I figured I’d fill you in on just one little bit of my not so distant past.

Christmas.

In the florist shop there are holidays and then there is the holiday season. Thanksgiving for example is a bunch of work all slowly leading up to the culmination of one day. Same thing with Mother’s Day. You would think that, following that pattern,  christmas would also be a big ramp up with a mildly jarring day but doable. I’m here to tell you that Christmas arrangements take up a solid month. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. No slow, gradual increase in arrangement sales. It is a cacophony of arranging. The big time of arranging, not piddly little vased things but delicately crafted centerpieces.

First off, we work in evergreens during the month of December. Evergreens, in case you don’t know, are prickly and sappy, and come in branches that involve way more work to arrange with than leatherleaf for example. Ever damn centerpiece that gets ordered takes close to half an hour to green up. We have to get a floral foam and soak it in water and shape it to the plastic design tray and tape it in and stab candles through it and only then can we begin to actually green it. This is the fun part. I say fun in the same sense that torture can be mildly enjoyable. Have you ever had bamboo shoots rammed underneath your finger nails?  Well, I would imagine cedar feels just the same, and once it happens it has a way of finding your vulnerabilities again and again.

I thought I could just avoid cedar, but then that gives me fir. Where cedar is brutal, fir seems to be actually malicious. Fir feels like a porcupine in stick form, that you’re brushing against the grain. Hold it gingerly with just your fingertips and you’ll be fine, but as soon as you need to poke it into foam you’re done. Skewered. A kebob. No one in the shop had undamaged hands  this month. But at least we went home smelling of a Christmas tree farm. I particularly loved my lumberjacky sap coated arms and shaking needles out of my hair. It’s better than glitter I guess.