Oh Christmas Tree...

We decided to tempt fate and get the Christmas tree more than a week before Christmas this year. With Jeffrey, Erin and 2 cats poking around the tree we'll see if we decide to do the same thing next year. We picked it out in town yesterday and got it put up and decorated last night. We started at the Boy Scout set-up in town. Although they had a fairly nice selection of trees it was a "self-serve" operation. Meaning there were no scouts there and a sign reading measure your tree here and put a check in the slot. Although I'm in favor of buying from the Boy Scouts I prefer if there are actual Boy Scouts on the premises. So...there was another nursery selling trees in the same shopping center. We headed over to look at them. Gorgeous trees, displayed well ---- WAY out of our price range unless we wanted a white pine that had be wrapped up or tossed on the ground. Needless to say we continued our search for the perfect Christmas Tree. We moved further north to someone who had a sign "8 Foot Trees $25". When we got there there were lights and an older woman coming out of a camper. As we looked around I realized that most of the trees were white pines, but at least these had been standing up and had a nice shape. We walked around for 10 minutes or so letting the kids, well mostly Erin we didn't trust Jeff enough to really put him down, to run around. We eventually stumbled upon a great tree for our corner. Tom shoved it into the trunk of the Intrepid, packed up the kids and headed home while I went to Target to get a couple strings of lights.

After staring at an empty shelf where lights used to be, I finally found some that would work grabbed a couple stocking stuffers for the kids and headed to meet Tom and the kids. I entertained the kids while Tom got the tree ready to come into the house. You know how they always look so much smaller standing outside? Well Tom's first attempt to bring the tree in revealed we needed to cut at least 18" off the bottom. Even then it was still a little tall and the angle almost didn't fit on top.

After a short pizza break we got to decorating the tree. Erin got all the ornaments ready and handed them to mommy and daddy to put on. She tried a few on her own, but white pines can be tricky and she got frustrated. Jeffrey tried his best also - mostly by throwing ornaments at the tree hoping they'd just stick there. No matter, they both had lots of fun getting all the ornaments out and up onto the tree. Erin's favorites are the few bells we have. Jeffrey likes the mesh balls that we sit over the lights (sadly this might be the last year for those as they are looking pretty smushed these days). After we had properly adorned our tree, Jeffrey got a quick bedtime story and headed off to sleepy land while Erin, Tom and I sat in the dark living room looking at the lights and just relaxing.

So we'll see how long it takes Jeffrey to knock the whole thing down. Certainly I'm going to be receiving ornaments from the tree as little gifts all through the day for the next couple of weeks. No matter it looks beautiful and the kids really had a blast this year getting it all ready for Christmas.