A Better Place - The Hobbit Fanfiction

Alternate Entry Fifteen - A Bright Holiday

I had never been happier in my life than I was the following winter. Some two weeks after I returned Bofur and Bifur took me out to Erebor’s surrounding forest to find a tree suitable for our home, Bifur swinging and twirling a saw at his side while Bofur spun his ax on his shoulder.

“I can’t judge numbers so you’ll have to judge how tall it gets to be yourselves,” I told the brothers—Bombur would have come if he hadn’t been so fat. He hadn’t wanted to march this far, having gotten quite his fill of marching during their quest eighteen months before.

“Well how tall you want it?” Bifur wanted to know.

I looked to Bofur. “How tall may I have it?”

He shrugged. “There’s only two of us in that big house.”

I grinned, skipping happily along. “It only needs a little room at the top, maybe this much, for the star. Who do you know who can make me a star?”

“What kind of star?”

“A five-pointed one to go on top of the tree. So it’s got to have a proper trunk. The ones that split at the top won’t work.” I’d never had a tree before either. But I’d helped a friend of mine find them once or twice.

“What kind of pine you want?”

“A green one.”

Bofur rolled his eyes. “Oh aye, we figured you wanted one that was living. But what kind of living pine tree you want? Blue spruce? Conifer? Jack pine? White pine? Scotch pine?”

“A green pine?” When they laughed at me I shoved Bofur in the shoulder and he in turn stumbled a half-step into Bifur. “I don’t know! I’m not a naturalist. I grew up in a place without many trees and of the ones we had I certainly didn’t know more than a couple of names. I’ve told you what I know about it and that’s all!”

Twenty minutes we stood before a fluffy-looking pine tree that stood at least four times our height. Hiking in skirts had taken a little bit of practice so the longer, winter hems wouldn’t catch on my feet when climbing uphill, but I was getting the hang of this dress business far quicker than I had expected. And a day didn’t pass when the apron didn’t come in handy.

“Well?” asked Bofur. “What do you think?”

I walked uphill a little further to look all the way around it. It had some dodgy-looking gaps in the branches about halfway up. “How much of it do you think would fit?”

“Oh, about the top two thirds.”

“And where would it go?”

“In the living room.”

“Where in the living room?”

“Where you want it?”

I groaned. “Bofuuuur. Don’t make me make all the decisions!”

“Well why not this is your holiday!” Bifur retorted for him.

“And it’s Bofur’s house first and then mine!”

“How about opposite the window, by the door?”

I nodded, contemplative. “That’ll do. But this one’s got too many gaps to hide if we put it there.”

Bifur hitched his saw back over his shoulder. “Moving on then.”

It took us a little over an hour of active searching to find a tree to the caliber I wanted, at least for our first family Christmas, as I was calling it, because this was the first Christmas at which all of my living dwarf friends would be able to make it. I then stood back as Bofur put a chip in two sides of the base of the tree after deciding which way they wanted it to fall, and Bifur set in with his saw after Bofur had also chopped away many of the branches that had previously impeded him from doing so.