OH CHRISTMAS TREE

Every year, we head to the same Christmas tree farm to select and cut our tree for the season. It's the cutest place, operated by a cute old man wearing a cute Christmas sweater. They serve hot chocolate and apple cider in their cute little cabin, and even sell cute little marshmallow launchers, homemade treats and gifts. The kids LOVE watching the tree being placed on the 'shaker', where all the loose needles, snow (and whatever else might be in there) are vibrated off the branches. Then the crew of cute young men loads the nicely netted tree on your vehicle, and you head home on your cute little way.

We usually like to wait for snow before making the trek for our tree.  It's more fun to traipse through the snow, pulling one of the provided sleds, in search of the perfect tree.  So this year, we took advantage of the school closing and blizzard conditions and headed to Wickiup Hill Tree Farm. As we approached the gate and could see it looked deserted, we wondered if it was closed during the week???  Odd...  Because the weather??? Unlikely... Hmmm  As we got close enough to read the sign on the gate, we read the very UNCUTE message, "CLOSED FOR THE SEASON.  OUT OF TREES".  WHAT!? Out of trees!?!?!? Now what.

Both Ben and I seemed to recall seeing signs for another tree farm nearby, so we headed in that direction.  We found it without too much difficulty. When we pulled in, it too looked deserted... but I hopped out of the truck anyway and headed for the door of the house that sat on the property. When a man in a plain sweatshirt (not any hint of Christmasiness on it) opened the door to greet me, I about  jumped out of my skin. (I really didn't expect anyone to answer for some reason.)  He directed me to the trees,  and instructed me to just bring it back when we were done.  OK.  I guess.  No sled? No hot chocolate? No carpet square to kneel on while cutting? 

I guess at least we got a saw.

We headed out in the direction he pointed us in and were pleasantly surprised to see a LOT of trees.  Hmmm, maybe this place wasn't so bad?  The trees were planted with no rhyme or reason - some clumped all together, squished by the others... not in nice lines like the other place.  And because of this arrangement, we did have a difficult time finding a tree that looked good all the way around.  I don't know how many times we exclaimed, "This one is great!" and then looked at the squish, bare, brown back-side... "oh, guess not".  Darn.  Clearly, this place has never had an overflow of visitors, as it had MANY FULL GROWN (like forest size) trees available for cutting - for 40 bucks! We got a lot of laughs out some of the gargantuan trees available as "Christmas Trees".  Hardly!  

We did actually have loads of fun with all the snow.  It was snowing so hard, I eventually had to put my camera away because it was getting wet and covered.  As you can tell by my the pics, I think we had an inch on us before we left. 

Look at those flakes!! See Will back there? 

Jakey trying to catch some of the giant flakes in his mouth

Ahhhh success at last!

And who would'a thought that even without all the provided cuteness, that we'd still have a blast finding our tree? :-)  And though I'm constantly vacuuming sharp pine needles off the carpet (since the sweatshirt-guy didn't own a "shaker"), the bonus of finding an abandoned bird's nest inside the branches was worth it. 

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!