The Last Christmas Tree

 

This past weekend we finished up our Christmas trees and had one small 4 foot Noble left over. We were planning on giving it away if we needed to. We closed the gates and were starting on our clean up on Sunday night when a couple came to the fence and asked if that little tree was for sale. It was the perfect tree for them. I was so glad they bought it. They were really happy about finding one. The whole town is out of trees.

We are starting the clean up and the teardown of the tents, electrical, plumbing and supply items. We have to wash all of the water bowls and bind the metal stands together so they will all fit back into the equipment trailer. We also had to teardown the office and get everything ready to load. We took our time and finished getting everything ready to load by Tuesday night. The company plans on picking everything up by Friday and we can then move back up to the San Antonio area on Sunday. They are going to have an end of season meeting/party on Christmas day.

Our sales figures for this location was 1065 trees with a gross sale of $107,650. This company has a lot of expense getting the lot leased, the tent and perimeter fencing and of course shipping all the trees from Oregon.  Our labor cost goal was to come in at $3.50 a tree. We missed that goal by .24 cents. We came in at 3.74 a tree. I think that is really good considering that this was a new lot location and that our warehousing and flocking area was in a building 200 yards away from our tent. It cost us extra manpower to move the trees and to clean up the flocking building.

Max and I could return next year and keep this same location year after year if we want to keep doing this. It would probably get easier each year as we learn easier methods etc.. The problem is that if we head too far away, the cost of getting back every fall makes it hard to justify. This is very hard work and it would have to be worth it financially. We will be camp hosting at Big Bear Lake in California this summer so we will have to see how well we do this year to see if we do it again next year.

Right now we are very sore, very tired and ready to get back into “Retirement Mode”. We are looking forward to heading to Arizona in January and the RV-Dreams Boondocking Rally in February. Then in March we report for our camp hosting job. Hopefully we can make enough this next summer to make our Alaska trip a reality for 2014.

Enjoy Your Day!