Oh Christmas Tree!

What Christmas tree traditions did you grow up with?

For instance, it was a tradition in my family growing up to go out and buy a Christmas tree (at one of those tree lots) on or around my brother's birthday. I guess my parents felt bad for the poor guy for having a birthday so close to Christmas that they wanted to make his birthday special. (By the way, happy birthday Van - you're my favorite younger older brother!). We would often go to my high school (or what would become my high school) and pick out a nice, real, "fresh"* tree (*more on what really constitutes a fresh tree below).

Well, last weekend Tiffany and I started our own little Christmas tree tradition. Being new residents of Colorful Colorado, we found that people around here don't always go for the tree-farm raised, "fresh" Christmas trees as do people from St. Louis and Chicago; nor, do they all rush down to their basements to dust off their fake tree (lights still strung) for another Christmas season.

So, what does that leave? Absolutely, positively FRESH Christmas Trees!!

Apparently there's a huge mountain just out our window that has plenty of trees. So, we went out and got in touch with our inner lumberjack (which wasn't hard for me, as I've been growing a beard since Thanksgiving). That's right, we cut down our own Christmas tree! How sweet is that?! Now, that's a real, fresh, right out of the ground Christmas tree for ya. While most trees on lots have been out of the ground for weeks before you get them home, ours was out of the ground and in our house within an hour...that includes a lunch stop on our way home (hey, lumberjacking takes a lot out of you). Here's some pictures from yet another Colorado adventure:

The Lumberjack wields his saw, ready to hack down the perfect tree.
We looked long and far and thought we had found "the one" many times before we happened upon "Jolly Green" (that's our tree's name. Oh, by the way, our tree is a "he".). The tree is green, and mind you green is a Christmas color, plus the word "jolly" often goes along with Santa (as in Jolly 'ol Saint Nick); so, we think we picked a perfect name for this guy:

Where's Tiffany? Can you see her? She's giving Jolly Green the "hug test" to make sure he isn't too prickly. I hugged it too and Tiffany was right...not too, too prickly.

Victorious!!

Now, I've never, ever wished I had participated in Boy Scouts until...we got the tree back to the Xterra (which, by the way, I named "White Thunder"), where I had to figure out how to secure Jolly Green on top without it taking off and landing in the middle of Route 24 (like one of Tiffany's co-workers experienced last year). I knotted that rope like I've never knotted before - triple, quadruple times. Alas, he made it intact -- despite my bright idea of putting the top of the tree pointed toward the front of the car (you'd think I'd never brought a tree home with my parents for 20-plus years). For some reason I thought since the tree came to a point, it'd be more aerodynamic that way. Hey, I was a business major, not an engineer. In my marketing mind, I thought the tree looked more picturesque that way.


As it turns out, the tree skirt makes a festive poncho:
The cats seemed very curious. It was as if they were thinking, "you brought the outside on the inside!"

By the end of the day we had the tree, and our little apartment, all decorated for Christmas (Tiffany graciously surrendered her new poncho in order to clothe Jolly Green).

And, after careful consideration, it appears that the cats determined that the tree wasn't all that bad after all.

Merry Christmas!