Christmas tree hunt 2017

Each year, Christmas creeps into our house earlier than the previous year. Last year it was the first part of December, the earliest I have ever allowed that. This year? Pfft. This year our empty nest began decorating before the Thanksgiving leftovers got old. 

Darcy dug out the Christmas decorations because she wanted to take stuff back to school. All of our Christmas stuff is in bins in our one car garage, and because she had already taken down three bins to dig through, I told her to take it all down. Might as well let those bins join the ones from The Condo still waiting for places to be shoved inside the house. And then, because they were down and the fall holiday was over, I cleaned and put away all of that stuff and started on the Christmas inside decorating. 

Monday we got our tree. On November freakin' 27th. Turns out it was a good thing to do. Apparently there is a shortage of trees due to the recession. When the tree guy at Lowe's responded to our dismay of their bare tent with that information, I didn't get it. I worried we were in a recession I knew nothing about, and for a minute I thought Twitter had let me down on keeping me abreast on the world's news. But on the drive to Home Depot, it came to me. Trees take several years to grow. OH. (Bright intelligence skipped me in my family. Sometimes it takes days for me to catch up)

Tree hunting was my job with my dad. We would set off to a tree farm, march through the rows in the cold looking for the perfect tree, and then cut it down and haul it home. I loved it. It was my favorite thing of the holiday. No fake trees for us. Of course, like many of my traditions, I forced my husband to convert. He had a fake tree, but after we married I insisted on the real version and we have had one every Christmas. It became our family tradition to hunt down the perfect tree.

Now its just us and the dog picking out the tree. Elliot enjoyed sniffing other dogs and really enjoyed the attention from children. I had two great conversations with two different little girls who filled me on everything from their own dogs to their teachers. It made me miss children even more. I'm going to need to rectify that somehow in the coming year.

Home Depot had just gotten in a tree shipment and had plenty. It took us lifting five trees before we found the perfect one. I wanted to put the tree in the same spot that we use to put the fake tree, different from what we have done since the girls' births. While Darcy argued with this idea, I reminded her changes were happening across the board. This tree needed to be thinner than normal to fit between the couch and the television, and this tree met all of our requirements.

We took it home, set it up, spent a day trying to get the lights on it, and finally finished decorating it on Tuesday. Just in time to welcome in December and the holiday! Here we come Christmas!