The Christmas Tree

This year with a bigger home I wanted a bigger tree.  I had to have a small, 6 foot, skinny tree for the past 8 years in our old house.  This year I wanted it to be different - I wanted a real tree and I wanted a big tree to go in our great room.  For those of you who have not been to our house yet - our great room has 12 foot vaulted ceilings in the center and tapers down to 9 foot ceilings on the edges.  So, one icy, cold Saturday morning we all bundled up to go to the local greenhouse and pick out our Christmas Tree.  The kids loved the adventure and Jed and I had fun watching them enjoy.  We walked through the greenhouse (Jed only knocked over two trees and Kyra only knocked over one - I say only because both of them could have made the entire line of trees go down with their mishaps)!  I was crying I was laughing so hard - hey, it wasn't me, I could laugh.  :-)  So, Kyra finds this little 3 foot Charlie Brown tree that she falls in love with.  We tried to explain to her that we had a bigger tree in mind for this year - one that would hold all of their ornaments and maybe be taller than she is!  She was disappointed but kept looking for "the big one" with us.  We finally found two that we thought looked really nice and were good sized but not too big.  We decided on one and the guy working there asked if we had a pickup.  Jed turned and said, "no we have a van".  The man paused, then "okay".  The woman who was working with him rolled her eyes and then grabbed one end of the tree.  She was less than impressed with this family that was going to transport their tree home in their mini-van.  But, they got it up there and we got it tied down and headed home at 30 miles an hour so that we wouldn't lose the tree - a 15 minute drive can take forever when going 30 miles and hour (on icy roads I might add).  So, we get it home and get it into the house and so begins the fun and the mess.  As Jed and I started to lift it up into the tree stand I quickly realized that our tree that looked like just about the right size in the big greenhouse was a little too large for even our 12 foot ceilings.  So, we laid it back down and Jed started the "trimming" process - a foot off the top and a good foot and two feet off the bottom and we were ready to try again.  And as Jed is trimming it, Kyra says as serious as can be, "You know, if you guys would have picked the tree that I wanted we wouldn't be having this problem."  :-)  We had a good laugh about that - what you can say when she's right?!  As you can see in the pictures below, the whole trimming/arranging process left quite a mess on our floor (and on our hands, we spent days trying to get rid of the sticky sap on our hands - Jed kept reminding me of scenes from the Griswald Family Christmas.  Truly, it was kind of like that!)  But, even with all of the issues that we had, it was a great experience and a fun day together as a family and one we aren't soon to forget.