What a Tree Can Do!

We started out our snowy morning with shoveling as per a usual, northern, winter, activity before we set out on our adventure to get our Christmas tree and decorate for the holidays. Well, actually Dave and then kids went and shoveled and then Dave left them out there to finish the job.Of course some were having way too much fun with the first real snow fall of the year to worry about mundane things such as shoveling. So after getting on the road an hour later than we planned to we reached the tree farm. We use to just go and buy one already cut in town somewhere but a few years ago our friends turned us on to cutting our own and we have been hooked ever since. Now the place that we have gone every other year is great because it is ANY tree for $20, you can't beat that with a stick, however it is about an hour drive. So this year we thought maybe we would try to find something a but closer which we did but their trees are anywhere from $23 - $43 and of course the trees out in the "wild" do not come with labels so unless you are a huge pine tree connoisseur, which surprisingly we are not, you can't tell a fir tree from a blue spruce from a white pine. So Dave tried to get a general idea of what we "should" look for to at least stay under $30 and we headed out with the kids in tow...Some quite literally!Baby first steps in snow!Baby being carried after first fall in snow. The kids had so much fun running around through the trees playing in the new fallen snow! It was a perfect day for it. It has been so cold here lately without snow but just the day before we got a ton of snow and it was only about 37 degrees out. Now for anyone that has lived in the northern states knows that anything warm enough to keep the boogers in your nose from freezing is a "good" winter day and 37 was just that.Now I am kind of picky about my Christmas trees. The most common it seems are the trees with the short needles on them which we have gotten may times in the past, but I like the ones with long needles. Dave thought that the ones in our price ranger were the ones with the "really" long needles which is actually a little too long for me. I know do I sound like Goldy locks? But those trees also have wispy branches to go with their needles and just don't hold much weight. Then I found the perfect trees, the kind I just love, the ones that are not too short but not too long and they kind of almost have the blueish tint to their needles, I have no idea what kind of trees they are but I love them. They also happened to be the ones that the branches didn't start until about 3 feet off the ground (Brody could actually walk under neither it) and usually we judge how tall of a tree to get by having David stand next to it. So Dave was unsure due to the fact we had no idea just how tall it was really going to be or how much it was really going to be but after looking around a little while he decided we could get the tree I liked.Okay so as Dave suspected it was a little taller than what we needed.
But the good news is it only ended up being $24 so that right there saved me for all the extra work Dave was going to have to go through trimming it down at home. I think he did end up taking off another 3 feet to fit it in the house but was happy to have power tools at home rather than the hand saw he had to "chop" it down with. The kids thought we should have brought an ax with us.

At home the decorating began. We have very strict "rules" for decorating our tree. Dave always has to listen to Nat King Cole, each of the kids has their own box of ornaments they get to put on the tree, they get a new one each year for Christmas.Brody was a little upset his box only had two in it. So here he is stealing one of his sisters he wouldn't let me take a picture of him pouting, he kept running away. Kain was there decorating but this is the only picture I got of him... his arm!

Aubriel helped Dad put the Angel on this year. We have both an Angel and a Star and we switch back and forth between them, Aubriel said she wanted the Fairy on top of the tree this year. So the star went on the fake tree we put up in our bedroom.Here are the kids in front of the newly decorated tree and all of our stockings. Now you may notice that one of our stockings does not face the same direction as the rest.... that one would be mine. The other one that does not look like it "belongs" would be David's. I have rules about stockings and one of them being you can not get a new one, the stocking you have as a baby you always have. Mine was made for me by my Aunt and growing up my brother had a knit one that could hang either way so for several years we never noticed that mine went the "wrong" way. David keeps telling me to just get a new one but of course when I suggest that he permanently hangs up his beloved stocking his Great-Grandmother made for him he won't think twice about it... so mine will remain exactly where it is. Since David's is also knit I have tried hanging it the other way so that it looks like there is some balance to our fire place mantel but he also hangs his back the other way so his matches the kids.

Now, you will probably also notice that 3 of the 4 kids stocking match perfectly, this is just how neurotic I am about things matching. When we had Kain and I went to buy his stocking I looked high and low for not only the right one for our new little babe's first Christmas but for two other matching ones and right then I bought all 3. See at that time we were planning on having 3 kids and I wanted all of their stocking to match without ever having to get a "new" one. However as we all know plans change and that has come to include stockings as well. The stocking that Aubriel had for her first three Christmases became Brody's when he was born so that all the boys would match and she got a new shinny gold one. I have no idea what I am going to do now for the new baby!

I think we all have our own Christmas memories from childhood that does not make Christmas the same without them. Over the years both mine and David's mothers have given us things to decorate with that we remember fondly as making our Christmas our Christmas. For me one of those things was always my stocking, not for the reason that most probably have memories of their stocking though. See in our house Santa never came (not by any trying on my Mother's part), yes, I was the little kid no body ever wanted their children to talk to at Christmas time. I was all about spreading the "truth" about Santa in an attempt to make myself feel better, unfortunately making my cousins feel worse, as I searched for a reason our house was the only one that seemed to be over looked every year. We would travel up to my Grandma's every Christmas Eve and each morning there at her house Santa would have stockings for both my brother and I as well as my cousins but it wasn't my stocking at home, and my cousin's were always filled at their homes as well. But yet we would still hang our stocking up year after year, as if some year after hanging it for long enough Santa would suddenly find our house and leave us something in it, anything but every year mine and my brother's stocking hung by the fire place and every year they remained empty. Even after I had kids their stockings seemed to be filled every year but mine still remained empty, there were even years David's would be filled with something, sure one year it was socks with a post it from his mom on it, that was strange, but always something. Then it happened! After 30 years of my stocking being hung above fire places in many different homes I finally awoke to something placed inside of mine. 30 years of my stocking never holding anything and now suddenly it was full, full of candy, of an ornament that even surprised David that morning and a prayer necklace. Amazing how in one moment two prayers could be answered. I have always wanted one, you write your prayer on something and place it inside to held close to your heart. Ironically enough my prayer that was held in my heart every Christmas was answered with something for prayers... their was a gift for me in MY stocking.

So needless to say the stockings have always been a huge part of Christmas for me and I longed to have a house with a fireplace to hang them by. Our fireplace is kind of the heart of our home anyway but even more so at Christmas time. We have a fire almost every night during December, our tree sits right next to it, we have the traditional family picture that hangs above it, my favorite Advent Calender sit in the center of the mantel (you guessed it, it is a Santa that works his way down the chimney with each passing day) and all of our stockings hang from our fireplace!

My mom was nice enough to help me decorate our porch. Here is our house now at night.

So after our long day of hiking over the river and through the woods to cut down our tree, decorate the inside and outside of our house, we gathered around our warm fire as a family, watched a Christmas special with the kids and then sang Christmas songs. The singing was a first for our family but I suppose we finally have enough voices with just our family alone to not notice those horribly out of tune. It was the perfect end to the perfect day and now we are set to enjoy the rest of the season and all that it brings us this year. We hope we leave our children with the fond Christmas memories David and I have as children. Some we can continue to share with how we remember them for the most part, such as Christmases with my parent's families and many we have started a new, such as Christmases with just our parents, the now Grandparents, but both are a part of OUR Christmas for OUR family, making OUR traditions.