It's Beginning to Look a lot Like Christmas

This weekend we went to cut down our Christmas tree. We do this every year with the same group of people. It's become one of our Christmas traditions, and it's really a lot of fun.


No offense to our Christmas tree growing up, but it was an artificial one. At that time, not a lot of people bought real Christmas trees, at least not in my neighborhood. The McGraths across the street had a white one that they kept in their foyer. But that wasn't the best part. They also had a light that changed from red to blue to green that they would shine on the Christmas tree. No joke. We would watch that thing for hours. Cheap entertainment.


In our house every year, my parents would wrangle a huge box up the basement steps and plop it into the living room. When we would open the dusty box, we were immediately met with a musty smell. The Christmas tree waited inside, all in pieces. Each branch was held together by a thick wire. And on the end of the wire was a painted color that corresponded to the hole on the tree pole ("trunk"). Once the tree was in the stand, you could try to match the branches to the trunk. Sounds easy, huh? Yeah, not so much when half the paint was chipping off or you couldn't tell if the color was green or blue, or rust.


Next came the lights. As if untangling the mound of lights wasn't enough, plugging in the strands to see if they worked was another job. And if they didn't work? Well, you wouldn't throw them out. Oh no, there was some engineering to be done. In other words, go through each strand, bulb by bulb, and see if you could find the culprit. Right.


And then came the dusty, fuzzy garland. I think it was gold. Or silver. Regardless, this same garland came in handy when my brother's needed some "garnish" for their shepherd's costumes for the church Christmas pageant. The silver or gold looked exquisite tacked onto my dad's light blue terry cloth bathrobe.





And finally the ornaments. I loved (and still do) the ornament part. Every year you get to reminisce about special ornaments given to you by special people. My mom did a great thing every year. She bought all of us ornaments surrounding a theme. So now on our Christmas tree, we have a lot of ornaments, some as old as me! In fact, one of my favorite ornaments is the spoon from my "Hey Diddle Diddle" mobile that my mom fashioned into an ornament. Very cool.
It wasn't until I was in college that we got rid of the artificial tree and got a real one. Go figure - the church started selling them as a fundraiser and suddenly we were real-tree converts. At one point, we even had 2 in our house (we really wanted to give to the church). It was at that time that I decided real is the way to go. You really can't get that pine smell from a candle. Or from Pine-Sol. Believe me, I've tried.





After college, my roommates and I would go to the local lot selling trees. I never really considered where they came from, I guess somewhere in the "country". "You can take a girl out of the city..."



Okay, I digress. Back to Saturday. We went to a tree farm not far from our house. The day was grey and cold (about 25 degrees - brrr). I bundled up in long johns, boots, hat, mittens, and my heavy ski coat. I didn't know how long it would take to find "our" tree, and I didn't want to be cold. Luckily, I really didn't need all of the layers because we only took about a half hour to find our tree. Here is a shot of the tree before we got it:

(That's Stein on the right cutting it down. My job was to wait for the signal to pull the tree while he sawed. I had time for a picture.)

And here it is once we (Stein) cut it down.

And check these out. No, I didn't touch up the pictures in blue. These are blue Christmas trees. If the McGraths could only see these now. They wouldn't need their fancy rotating lights. Seriously, how do you decorate without clashing colors?

After loading the tree into the car, we headed over to our friends Doug and Susan's house for a get-together. There ended up being a lot of people there, about 25 + kids, so their house was pretty full. When we first started this tradition, there would only be a group of us, so it really has become an event. Our holiday eating continued. Everyone brought an appetizer or dessert, and Susan made chili, so there was food galore. One of my favorite recipes there was this one which may become an appetizer I bring to all holiday parties:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,,FOOD_9936_30611,00.html

We left their house just in time to drive through snow and freezing rain. Lovely. We made it home safe and I immediately crawled into bed.

Sunday, we had our niece and nephew over to decorate the tree. This has also become a tradition for us. Eric has been doing it for about 4 years now, and this was the 2nd year for Mia. We still separate the really fragile ornaments from the less-fragile ones just to be safe. This year, they thought that the back of the couch would be a great ladder to use. I didn't want to see either one of them dive into the tree, so I kept a close eye on them. Here are some pics from Sunday:

Eric putting some ornaments on. (That was the other thing - Stein and I had to do a little rearranging after they left to eliminate the cluster factor).

Stein giving Mia a boost to hang an ornament. "I want to hang this one really high!" she said. (She said that with all of them.)

Keeping steady with my hand on the ceiling while I put the finishing touch on the tree top. Beth the angel. (My mom named her. She was actually made by my Aunt Connie, but she lives in a box from Beth's Hallmark.)


And the tree, all aglow. If only you could smell it. It smells like Christmas. And it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas around here.