Cone Day

When the holiday season is approaching the Pine Forest, everybody gets into a jolly mood. But they do things a bit differently here. For example: when it’s time to decorate, Pine Foresters don’t chop down trees and put them up in their living rooms. Oh no, they instead decorate the trees that grow around town. They collect and paint cones and hang them on the trees. And everyone has a lot of fun doing so — especially Otja. He likes this tradition very very much. So much that he has been collecting cones for an entire year. He has filled 5 big boxes full of cones and put them in his basement. The boxes contained pine cones, spruce cones, fir cones and even giant sequoia cones.

On one special day, known as Cone Day around here, Otja called over his friends Lorem, Nanna and Dolor (Ipsum couldn’t make it, because she was visiting her dormouse family in France). They sat down at the table and began painting the cones with brushes. Every now and then they took a break to eat some cookies. One by one, the cones changed colors: blue, yellow, pink, gold, purple, orange, silver, red. Nanna doused them in glitter and Lorem drew funny faces on them. They did this for the enitre day — there were so many cones paint! And let’s not forget: once the cones were painted, a tiny bit of string had to be attached to them.

When evening came around, Otja and friends were finally finished. They packed up the colorful cones and went out into the snow. They walked around the neighbourhood and attached their pretty painted cones to the trees (with the help of a broom). All the other animals of the Pine Forest were doing this as well and soon all the trees in the town were alive with vibrant colors.

“This is very nice” said Lorem, once they were done.

“It sure is” said Otja. He paused and enjoyed the view. After a while he said:

“Oh boy, I can’t wait to start looking for new cones!”