O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree!

I am so excited about this!!

Growing up my mom NEVER ever EVER bought a real Christmas tree. Why? I have no idea! It was probably too expensive and too much work for them. So I’ve always wanted to have a real tree. One that I could smell throughout the month.

I sort of got my wish when I spent the majority of the past decade at my sisters’ house for the holidays. My sister also loves the real Christmas tree smells and always gets a really nice tall Douglas Fir tree. We would sit in the flow of the lights while it rained outside and enjoyed the Christmas smell in the air.

Now, I live in Southern California which tends to have very hot and dry conditions year round. Not the best growing place for Christmas trees. Still there are a few Christmas Tree Farms in the area. I decided on one about 20 miles away after reading a good review on Yelp. They only had Monterey Pine trees to cut, but not knowing the difference really I decided to head there. The price to cut a tree, no matter the size, was $55, which seemed fair.

However as we got closer to the trees I didn’t really like them. We walked through the trees looking for the perfect one. None looked right. As Thomas commented… they didn’t really feel like Christmas Trees. They just looked like pine trees somewhat shaped into Christmas trees (well that is what they are, after all!).  We decided to take a look at the pre-cut trees. They were lined up in height order and then by kind. They had Noble Fir and Douglas Fir (and I think one other kind, but I can’t remember what it was). The one that looked like what my sister always gets and that smelled the nicest to me was the Douglas Fir. The price also was nice! $35!

  

There was even a bird nest on our tree. I knew it was a good one at that point.

We let the guy know we would take it and headed over to have it shaken out to get rid of any loose needles and bugs (and in this case a birds nest – no birds or eggs were harmed).

Then they wrapped it up for the trip home…

And then, after trimming the trunk, the nice guy Angel went ahead and loaded it on to the roof of my car. I was a little nervous about driving on the freeway on the way home, but the man assured me that he did a very good job at securing it. He was right, we had no problems.

We had to make a stop at Target to buy a stand. I didn’t like the ones they had at the farm.

That’s when things started to go wrong. I had seen the stand that we bought on a previous trip to Target. It looked neat because it had a nice little spout type thing to put the water in. What I hadn’t realized is that there are different sized stands for different sized trees. I bought the biggest one which was for trees up to 10 ft. Our tree is just over 7 feet, but it was too big for it.

Of course we didn’t realize this at first and we spent a good amount of time screwing the screws in (which was insanely difficult), then putting the tree in and tightening the screws. Then we realized that the trunk of our tree is very short and didn’t go far enough down into the stand for it to reach the water. Of course we then had to undo the screws, take the tree down, and take a trip to Target.

A few hours later we attempted again with a new stand (with no water spout area). This time it worked, although it was still difficult. The tree kept leaning and I was afraid that it would tip at any time. Luckily Thomas had perseverance and figured out how to fix the way we screwed it in so that it stands up straight.

At that point we were tired and it was late, so we went ahead and left the decorating for Sunday. We had a good time doing the decorating on Sunday afternoon while watching Home Alone. Since we are just starting out all our ornaments are new to us, but we have a couple which are of special meaning.

I went ahead and decorated the rest of the house as well – although we are still missing some lights, so I'll go ahead and post those pictures when everything is up!