We lie blanketed under a norte or frente frio or, as they say on the other side, a cold front. This time of year, we get a lot of them. The sky turns a heavy, unremitting gray. If it isn't raining, it is drizzling or misting. The temperatures sink to the low fifties at night and the low sixties during the day where we live. Up at higher altitudes, it is often close to one side or the other of freezing. For most people here, it ranges from uncomfortable to miserable. The man who built our house installed a small Scandinavian wood stove made of iron. Last year, the chimney plugged up. Jim made a yeoman (that's the word indicating major, right?) effort to clear it without success. We huddled and snuggled a lot. Yesterday morning, he tried again and after several hours had managed to disassemble what had seemed permanently glued together and unload buckets of creosote and ash and not a little rust. Yesterday afternoon, with some bundled-up friends visiting he lit a successful fire. We all smiled and thawed out. The temperature in the living room rose to 70. Aaaah.
Just so you know, we are using wood from a tree Guillermo cut down in our yard because (he told us) it needed to be cut down. We have more wood seasoning right now from a tree that had to be cut down on a neighbor's street. And our stove is supposed to use wood efficiently. A lot of folks here use wood that comes from drastically pruning coffee bushes which they do every year. They also use wood which they probably shouldn't, though around here it's unusual to see any thick limbs that look like valuable trees have been cut down. We see kids and old ladies and men walking home with wood stacked up on their backs as well as leading burros carrying it in mounds carefully piled on their backs.
We drove up to just past Guillermo's family rancho to the outskirts of a small pueblo called Coxmatla to buy a Christmas tree a few days ago. There you can find a reforestation project where Christmas trees are planted in plots interspersed with newly-planted forest trees. All the Christmas trees are to be replaced after they are cut down as well. We went there a couple of years ago for a tree and the guy told us that a lot of big stores like Chedraui buy them in quantity.
Not Christmas trees but some goats in their house that we saw on our way up.
The path down to the Christmas trees.
The horse I think one of the workers uses to commute to the farm.
You can camp and picnic at the Christmas tree farm. Jim is reading the very politely worded rules for people doing those things so they don't harm the environment.
The tree up front and center is the one we chose.
We also bought a tree for someone in our neighbor's family. Christmas trees are becoming muy popular around here, as are Christmas lights.
Here is the worker at the farm tying up the tree for our neighbors.
We hope to put our tree up this afternoon.