Sale price, $1349 Plus Free Shipping
“Widely regarded as the best Christmas tree species in nature, the Fraser Fir is native to the forests of North Carolina and surrounding Appalachian states. Our BH Fraser Fir™ garners its identity and inspiration from this most famous fir. Equipped with the revolutionary Easy Plug™ feature, our Color+Clear™ prelit variety (up to 9′) and all other prelit options (up to 12′) eliminate the need to connect light strings manually. Now, the only plug you need to touch during setup is the one that goes in the wall.”

Comments about BH Fraser Fir Tree:

“Been buying a real Christmas tree for years. Tired of the mess and having to constantly water it. It amazing how real the Balsam Hill tree looks. Came in 4 pieces. Easy to assemble. No messing with lights. Used the gloves provided to protect my hands while spreading the branches. It took less than 20 minutes. Just need to decorate.”

The woman upstairs wears high heels in her house at night while she struts down her hallway. The sound reminds me of the time my brother and I were at a swimming hole one summer as kids. “Go under water and tell me what this sounds like,” he said and then tapped two round, wet stones together. “What does it sound like?” he asked when I came to the surface.
It sounds like your neighbor upstairs who wears her high heals in the house at night, quick thuds submerged under a lake of concrete.

“Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless in facing them.
Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain but for the heart to conquer it.
Let me not look for allies in life’s battlefield but to my own strength.
Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved but hope for the patience to win my freedom.
Grant me that I may not be a coward, feeling your mercy in my success alone; but let me find the grasp of your hand in my failure.” ~Rabindranath Tagore, Fruit Gathering

It started the week before last, an onslaught of emails reminding me of savings to be had. “Black Friday Week Deals…Cyber Monday Sale.” I had forgotten about Black Friday and had slept through the announcement of it growing into a weeklong phenomenon followed by a Monday of online shopping.

The streets are empty on Sunday. The stores are closed. There is a calm in the inactivity, a rest. Sundays have the stillness and quiet of winters. A winter Sunday is doubly quiet, doubly restful.

Our feet were on the dirt oval track and our backs against a wooden fence made of cut up telephone poles and worn 2×6 rails. A gap in the fence was our spot. Tickets in the stands are expensive, and you couldn’t get better seats to the Hollywood Stunt World Thrill Show than ours.
We were close enough to watch as the driver of one stunt truck turned the corner of the track and set it back down on two wheels. His face was calm as he sped within a foot of us, exploded into the wooden fence beside us, through the fried dough stand and onto the unsuspecting crowd.
Time does not stand still in these moments, it disappears. It’s rendered irrelevant. Time no longer ticks by with the secondhand of the clock on the wall, the gears of a gold wristwatch, or the electronic intervals of neatly divided moments measured by a computer in a cellphone.
The body enters a state of primal sensitivity to all that surrounds, every sound, movement, or smell.
The smell of car exhaust and frying dough mixed with screams of mothers whose children lay beneath unmovable steel and screaming vendors whose grease from tipped vats now covered them.
We ran. We ran past the 4-H barn of cows and sheep, past the vendors selling sausage with grilled peppers and onions, past the Ferris wheel and then slowed when we got to the rides where the youth mingled and plucked cotton candy and popcorn from their proud and careful hands.
Everything was normal. Carnies pried us to pop three balloons with three darts to win stuffed lions, fair music played, people laughed. No one knew what was happening at the Hollywood Stunt World Thrill Show.

The reviews online said the food was average but the atmosphere was authentically Parisian. I am not sure what is authentically Parisian, but there was something authentic about this restaurant. The tables were built in a decade when Parisians built tables. The artwork covering the walls could have been the collected gifts of patrons who could not pay their tabs over the past ten decades. A large, warm impressionist nude of a sleeping woman hung amongst a scattering of stilllifes of the same style.
We left the restaurant to walk the food off. Outside, a black car with a loud European police siren flung on the driver’s side roof passed us at a racing speed. “They always drive like that,” our friend said. His words were inaudible as a line of ambulances and police cars passed just then. The streets were filled with sirens and flashing blue lights. We followed the flow of emergency vehicles with our heads as if to see what they were going to. A man pushing a scooter along the sidewalk rode by and said calmly in English, ”Someone is shooting people up the street.” We humored him with, “Really?” “They just shot 10 people. I was just there,” he said. Somehow there was now a reality to this absurdity.
A crowd of Parisians now stood still beside us following the lights and perplexed by the activity. A black car stopped in the middle of the road and five armed and armored police jumped from the doors and yelled at us in French. Those who understood ran in the direction of the sirens, those who didn’t hesitated and then followed. The police yelled again, the crowd of the fleeing stopped and ran in the other direction, like a startled flock of sheep.
We ran. We ran to a subway station, boarded a train and quietly sat with passengers who laughed, sent messages on their phones, and knew nothing about what was happening to the city above.

MORE IMAGES FROM PARIS HERE