Picking Out a Christmas Tree

 

The 2nd week of December, Tommy and I “started” our tradition of going up North to pick out a and cut down a Christmas tree.  Tommy bought the permit in early November, but we were in Iowa over Thanksgiving and Tessa and I came back the first Saturday in December, so we were kind of late in the game, so to speak.  I say “started” because the trip didn’t exactly go well, and I’m not sure if the tradition will last if our trips continue to be like this one.

Ok, I should clarify, when I say the trip didn’t go well. I mean we did not find a good tree. Papa and Nana made the trip with us, Tessa seemed to have fun (although she didn’t really like the snow), and the weather was beautiful.  The trees, however, were not so good.  There were a lot of evergreen type trees but very few Christmas trees.  We ended up walking around for a long while, cutting down  a mediocre tree, then finding another bigger tree on the way out that we thought would be better (at least the top half) and cut that one down.  This is technically illegal to do, by the way, but we had some friends who didn’t use their permit so we kind of had an “extra” for the additional tree.

Our family picture:

 

Tessa loved sportin’ the winter wear:

 

Playing in the non-snowy parts:

 

Walking with Nana and Papa:

 

Tree Cutting #1:

 

Big strong man:

 

Tree #2:

 

Enjoying the ride:

 

So when we got the tree home and started cutting it down so it could fit in the house, we ended up having to take off one of the branches that had a lot of foliage on it. So the front 2/3 – 1/2 of the tree looked ok, but the back was basically bare.  This in itself wasn’t such a bad thing because the tree was going in a corner, but when we tried to set the tree up, all the weight was on the front, so it would fall over.  Since it was the middle of December, we opted against picking up a new one from Home Depot and set it up without ornaments and places some power tools and gallon jugs on the back of the stand to keep it standing up.  Classy, I know.

 

The finished product:

And it looked worse in person.

Fun experience, bad tree.  We’ll see how the next few years go!