For many of us, winter is a season of chilly toes and longingly looking out into the piles of snow that are all that is left of our beautiful gardens for the time being. The tradition of indoor bonsai allows ample opportunity to enjoy working with our hands in the therapeutic and soul satisfying occupation of gardening that is usually cut off in the winter.

For thousands of years, human beings have enjoyed indoor plantings that provided them with medicinal and food based needs. Royalty enjoyed more elegant decorative plants, formed into topiaries or the miniature tree forms of bonsai.

Like these traditions of old, a Christmas or solstice tree during the holiday season is an attempt to bring nature into our homes, providing a space where nature and man meet and celebrate the darkest time of the year.

Yesterday, when I was out enjoying the winter weather, arms full of packages for my loved ones, I noticed a small store with a decorated interior that exclaimed the holiday spirit that was bustling about in warm winter coats and mittens;  Its warm environment beckoning us all in from the cold outdoors with its cheerful window decorations. In the center of the window, on a beautiful stool, stood a perfect Rosemary bonsai bedecked with tiny glittering lights and lovely ornaments no bigger than my thumbnail. I stood in that window in admiration for the tiny bonsai tree, which unlike a traditional Christmas tree whose life ends with the season, would live on to see Christmas after Christmas after Christmas. A perfect miniature replica of the trees that stand tall in the forests of our world. Instead of ending life, instead of having been chopped to the ground…this bonsai Christmas tree was a message of life enduring.

A true Christmas tree.

Written by a guest blogger.