Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Cuttin' Down the Christmas Tree

It's a tradition in my family to go out to a Christmas tree farm the day after Thanksgiving and choose out and cut down your very own Christmas tree! None of this fake-o plastic anti-welcoming-pine-smell-when-you-come-home-all-through-December tree business. (NO offense to all of you who love your plastic trees! I just crave the real pine smell, ya know?) Anyway, so we found a great little Christmas tree farm (Beck family Christmas tree farm) and chose this darling little tree as our First Wittwer Christmas Tree! It's a beaut, aint it Clark?
They also have a hot chocolate stand so you can keep warm while their employees tie up your tree for you. They have REALLY good white chocolate flavored hot chocolate, but I wouldn't recommend their pumpkin spice flavor. If you're anything like me, pumpkin pie flavored chocolate is too intriguing to turn down, but I was way off on this one. This is one time your instincts definitely deceive you. I had to steal sips of Nelson's the whole time. Sorry, honey.
So we got the tree tied onto the top of our car with some flimsy twine and drove the slow way home. Little did we know that later my dad would take the leftover twine from off the top of our car and leave it hidden all over our apartment, tied to our hangers, candles, books, and everything else you can imagine. :) Joke's on us, I guess.
Check out the salt on our car! YIKES. Whoops. Must be the camera...
So we got home and tried to put it in our Christmas tree stand only to find out that the nice Christmas tree farm man had cut the base of the tree completely off so that it didn't reach the water in the bottom of the stand. Well, this was a problem. We didn't want a brown, dead, moldy tree by Christmas. So Nelson found some handy tips on the internet of how to salvage a tree in such a dire situation, and one of them was to put your tree in a bucket of water in the garage for 24 hours and let it soak up all the water it could, and then just hope for the best. One little problem. We don't have a bucket. Or a garage. SO we put it in the bathtub for 24 hours! And then spent the next week with our feet sticking to the infinite supply of sap in the bottom of the tub every time we took a shower no matter how many times we scrubbed it down. But, we are happy to report that it WORKED!
We spent the rest of that night decorating our apartment for Christmas. (Have I mentioned how much I LOVE Christmas?? I can't waste a day of the season - that officially starts when Thanksgiving ends, of course - without a happy decorated home.) One of my family's other Christmas traditions is to buy an ornament every year that represents something momentous that happened during that year. Sometimes it's a stretch when too many important things happen all at once, but at least for this year it was easy. Our First Christmas!
It took us SO stinkin' long to find a simple star to put on top of our Christmas tree. You'd THINK that'd be easy right? WRONG. We went to every store in town.
Nelson being manly and using his tool set to hang up our stockings :)
And then we celebrated the beginning of the season with a nice bowl of
Christmas, candle-lit Mac n' Cheese. Nelson's choice :)
That was a happy night.

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