Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Getting a Christmas Tree

Picture this little family walking up the hills looking for the picture perfect Christmas tree. Singing Christmas Carols and rejoicing in the outdoors that God created for enjoyment! Sounds awesome doesn't it! Well that's not how it was for us, in fact it was completly opposite and it is the same way every year!! We spend an hour getting the kids dressed up in warm clothes and get them in the car to find yourself yelling at your kids while there screaming because they are to hot or there clothes are to tight while telling them to be quiet so we can go out and find a Christmas Tree! That it's going to be fun and to stop!! I swear every year I share nicely with my husband that if we find a great tree we should stop cut it down and head out. No, not an Oster! It is something they are born with I think, this feeling that if they leave with the first tree they find it's a failure because they haven't hunted long enough or something. I actually had found this great tree, the first one of course and like always there was this long pause and then a comment that came from my wonderful husband that sounded a little bit like "Do you think we should keep looking for another one?" So like always we kept walking through the hills above our house at a Christmas Tree Farm and the kids of course already had started complaining that "my toes are cold", "my feet hurt", my hands are cold and so on. I swear we had looked at twenty trees, and finally we found one and agreed to one towards the middle of the hill and it was perfect or so we thought! We decided after Garrett's going crazy wild and yelling (which I swear all of the West Hills heard) so he could hear is echo, we should stop and cut it down and get out of here. So we took a quick picture and started cutting down the tree before dark. Poor Ryan always has the task of cutting the tree down and every year there is "something." This year he was on this slope and the tree stump was huge at the bottom. It didn't look like it at the time but this tree was huge! Why is that tree's always look smaller until you get it into your house? So as the kids kept complaining and crying I said to Ryan I will hike back into the car and you will have to follow. 30 minutes later poor Ryan was hiking up the hill with the tree, I was standing with the owner of the farm and he commented "You must have a big room in your house cause that's one of my biggest trees!" Yeah that's just it we didn't and our goal was to get a tall skinny tree. Needless to say it hung over front and back and both sides of our van, and when we got it into the house hit took up half our family room!! We had trim so much off the tree to make it fit and we still had to put it behind our couch. We laughed later that night giving eachother a bad time about our ability to pick a good Christmas tree, but hopefully our kids will remember the funny and fun times we had getting our tree. Enjoy the pictures!