The following post was written by my surprisingly DIY-crafty boyfriend, C.
I learned how to make wreaths in a small room of a giant barn. In that room there was a pot-belly wood stove and a long barn lumber table. Everything smelled of smoke and tool oil and cedar. And we were all really, super stoned.
All the people on what was referred to as The Seasonal Crew would start our day, like so many blue-collars before us, with coffee and cigarettes. Then we would walk the nursery, where we would clip cedar, cypress, spruce, and holly, exhaling ghosts on our breath like rodeo bull riders. It was someone else’s job to supply us with pine cones. That someone was usually new and not nearly as stoned as we were, which was a positive regarding the quality of our pine cone selection.
On the old, hand-and-tool smoothed table were the wire “nippers” and Felco pruners and high-heat glue guns, along with some crappy utility knives that went unused, as we each carried our own pocket knives kept sharpened to our own specifications. We would stand at the table and make wreaths and mantle boughs and various other festive stuffs for hours every day. And we would play Monster Magnet really, really loud. So loud that the resident mechanic would constantly yell at us to turn that commie shit down! And we would yell back fuck you, dude!
And then we would roll another joint. And make another wreath.
It didn’t pay much of course, and our hands itched because we all refused to wear gloves out of a spite for protocol. It was cold in that barn, too, and if you put too much wood in the old pot-belly stove the air would get so thick with smoke it would get hard to breathe. Still, it was one of the Top 3 Best Jobs I Ever Had.
Here’s how to make your own Christmas wreath.
About Charlie
