christmas tree!

growing up, my parents always took my sister & i to a tree farm about an hour's drive from our house, where hundreds of acres of land are covered with thousands of various pine trees... blue spruce, douglas fir, fraser fir, white pine... you name it.  basically, you park at their "home base," collect a tag with your name written on it to mark your tree with once you find it, and then either start off on foot or catch one of their tractor-drawn trailers to the different fields, segmented based on the type of tree you're looking for.


after hours of trying to find the perfect tree and bickering over the angles and bare spots and shape and so forth, we would always manage to find one (or two) that we agreed on, tag it, and cut it down.  the tractor guys come back around and pick it up to bring it back down the hill, where they drill the hole for the stand and put it in the baling machine to wrap it up in twine.  they even put it in the van or on top of the car for you while you're inside drinking hot cocoa and eating cookies.


fast forward back to the present... and on friday, i saw an advertisement for a sale on artificial christmas trees at the super home store (it's really not that super... just saying).  on saturday, i mentioned to ben that i thought it'd be a really nice thing for us to get so we can still feel a part of the holiday season while we're both away from our families.  don't get me wrong, benjamin is my family too, but i've never been away from home for the season before.


we make the trip down to the store and check out these "trees" (i've never had a fake tree before).  the ones that i deemed acceptable were about 130-200 euros... so $180-300 basically.  not gona happen.  the cheapest one was 20 and not so cute, and thaaaat's the one we bought.  i'm not cheap, but can't really justify spending tons of money on something we're going to throw away in a month.  we proceeded to find lights, and then were out the door.


we get home, and i set up the tree... paying much more attention to it, i'm sure, than the guys who put up the ones in the shop.

by the time i was done, it actually looked like a christmas tree!


....almost.


xox k