Getting our Christmas Tree

Let me preface this post by telling you that I have the cutest baby in my lap. She's smiling and cooing at me! I'll have to type fast!! :-)

Many years ago, back when Old Man and I were newlyweds, we had friends take us to chop down our Christmas Tree. Thus began our annual tradition of chopping down a Christmas tree. Sometimes I'm not sure whether I should thank them or curse them for this tradition. We've had all kinds of mishaps with our trees. The first mishap was with that first tree! Old Man's bow saw popped while he was cutting down the tree and he had a cut on his knuckle - down to the bone. But, seeing as it was Thanksgiving weekend, NO way did he get stitches. Gotta love those men. Oh, that's the other part of our tradition. We always get our tree on Thanksgiving weekend.

Seeing as this is "The Year of The Move", we've worked hard to keep our traditions for the kids. So they knew we were getting a tree and were soooo looking forward to it. We couldn't get the tree on Friday - too many other things going on. Saturday we were just too worn out to run out in the morning to the ONE place we found you can chop down trees (note - you can get them from the forest service here, you get a permit, treck around the mountains and get it that way - we figured that was a tad nuts with 5 kids in tow). We figured Sunday would work. We'd go to church and just run up to the tree place after church.

Checked the weather Saturday night - things looked great. Got up Sunday morning - snow. 4 or 5 inches and still coming down. The kids went out to play, I went out to take pictures. I came in and told Old Man that it was WAY too cold to take the baby out for the tree. We decided to send Dawn and Old Man only to get the tree. First they did the sensible thing and checked Home Depot. The trees weren't any good. So, despite the blizzard, they decided to drive half an hour further north to chop down a tree. I got numerous phone calls from Old Man telling me how bad the roads were and how many wrecks they were seeing. Apparently they walked through snow over Dawn's knees to the tree, had to dig the tree out of the snow and there was too much snow blowing for them to even take a picture! Hmmm, brilliant plan. On the way home, Old Man had to call me and ask me how to get home, since the road was blocked by a stuck 18-wheeler and a wreck. They were gone for over 5 hours to get this tree! The beauty of all this is that the tree isn't the best one we've ever gotten - probably one of the worse. It has 2 trunks! In order to even put it in the house, we had to cut the trunks apart and zip tie the trunks together. It won't fit in our normal tree holder, so it's in a large canning pot, held up by rocks, bricks and blocks of wood. And it's leaning. Badly. We will have to spend a large amount of time fixing it (again) this weekend.

Aren't traditions great???

(Confession: Ranee, you know how you wanted us to drive your truck? Old Man drove it to get the tree. He didn't wreck it. They did slide off the road once, but we're happy the four wheel drive works great! Old Man said he's probably going to have to buy it from you once he gets done driving it all over the place. Maybe we should take it to your folk's house soon!)