Trim A Tree For Wildlife

Who is the one person you would never want to play in a poker game?  Martha Stewart...? Me too!  I just can't read her.  She's got a perpetual-poker face.  Or maybe it's that with her amount of croissant-capital she could clean me out of mydough in a single bluff.  However, despite her intimidating wealth and impenetrable exterior, when I open the pages "A Martha Stewart Christmas", I feel we are twin souls.  I've been called the "younger, funnier, vegan-version of Martha Stewart"... okay, only once... and by me.

For many people, the holiday meals are all about the bird.  We love birds!  Especially my young son, who, thanks to Martha's instructions on how to decorate a tree for wildlife, has made this craft a yearly tradition of providing local winter birds with their own holiday meal.

Tangent alert: My son's infatuation with birds began two Easters ago when he received a basket of plastic eggs filled with treats.  After emptying the treats out onto the floor, he nestled them back into his grass-filled basket and carried them around with him for the entire day.  This was also the grand opening week of our local IKEA store and our first visit as a family: Pregnant Mommy, Daddy, Son, and basket of "Baby Eggs".  A year and a half later, he still checks in on his baby eggs and pretends that they will someday hatch.(more on this heartwarming tale in the spring.) End tangent.

For now, it's almost winter and cold enough outside to slow the activity of our favorite feathered entertainers.  So, to show our appreciation for their delightful presence, we strung up popcorn and decorated the blue spruce outside our window.  And per Martha's advice, we also filled little orange-halve-baskets with birdseed and hung them from the tree with biodegradable (hemp) string.  Then we rolled pine cones in peanut butter and then again in more birdseed which we also hung with hemp on the tree branches.  My favorite and most colorful decorations though, were dried fruit slices (apples and oranges) that we strung up and used to garland our wildlife gift tree!  We dried our own fruit slices in the Excalibur, but if you don't have a food dehydrator, a low oven setting will work fine.

I'm sure your family will enjoy giving this gift to your local winter birds.  But, don't be disgruntled if a sticky-toed squirrel snatches your orange cup and high-tails it (oh, that's what that means!) across the yard, up the neighbors ramp fence and out of sight, because... wouldn't you?

More instructions on decorating trees for wildlife can be found here.