Starting a New Christmas Tradition
We love the Christmas season and every year on the day after Thanksgiving, we put up our Christmas tree.
For various reasons (economical, cultural, upbringing), that tree was actually a plasticized replica of a tree purchased on sale after Christmas at Sears a number of years ago.
So “put up” = unbox, sort, assemble and decorate. This is all we have known, and all our children have ever known (sad, we know).
This year, however, just as we were about to start the annual process of getting out the “tree” from the garage. But just then, Evers remembered that in the process of disassembling the tree last year, the base had broken! And no spare parts were then available from the manufacturer. What to do? What a let down! Instead of mourning our loss, we decided to do something different. How about getting a real tree? But definitely not from Home Depot or Lowe’s parking lot. How about we cut one down and haul it home (something we’d read about in books but never had actually seen someone do in person)?
Adventurous and spontaneous family that we are, we headed out within the hour to start a new Christmas tradition!
We drove up into the mountains to a tree farm, and it was a beautiful sunny day for it. We passed by several Christmas tree farms as we drove up and up the mountain. We saw many cars coming down with Christmas trees on their rooftops. What a new experience for us to behold. We had never done this before. I felt like I had missed some sort of memo about getting a Christmas tree from a real tree farm versus a parking lot with pre-cut trees (let alone Sears’ clearance aisle after Christmas). We finally made it up to the tree farm of our choice, which was the highest point you could go up. How exciting it was for us to see a huge crowd there, just hanging out. Some were even BBQ’ing and having a picnic. Oh boy, I felt I had missed out all my life! After we got some free hot cocoa and apple cider the farm provided, off we went to search for the perfect tree.

We had so much fun looking for the one, and the kids had a great time wandering around. They each hauled around a tree branch of their own.

Finally, after about 10 minutes, we found the perfect tree! Here we posed in front of it before sawing it down to take it home.

Daddy had the honor of cutting it down. Our friends helped too!


Strapping the tree onto our rooftop and driving it home. We made sure our eldest got off the roof before we started driving again.


Setting it up in our living room.


Here is our beautiful and nicely decorated tree. I love looking at it!

We are proud owners of a real Christmas tree and we absolutely love it! We are so not going back to owning a fake tree; thus, henceforth, we will be adopting this tree hunting, cutting, and hauling as our Christmas tradition. Next year we’ll bring our own BBQ and make a picnic out of it.


















































