The Jungle

Cutting down our Christmas tree is a thanksgiving tradition. Always, always, always the friday after thanksgiving (also known as Black Friday) instead of getting up early to hit the sales at the stores, we head out to cut down our Christmas tree. We've been going to the same place for years now. It's a nice little place, about an hour and a half away but so worth it. All the tree's are spaced out evenly with enough space to see all sides of the tree and move around them easily. THe people that own it are nice, and they wrap up your tree for you, shake it so that all the dead pine needles get off of it and then help you get it up on the top of your car and tie it down. That was not so much the case this year. This year, we decided to go someplace new, someplace closer. Was it worth it...NO! My mom found it on the internet and it sounded all nice, with it's ads for FREE hot chocolate and FREE candy canes and the fact that ALL trees were only $22. I now know why all the trees were onlly $22. This place was a jungle. THe tree's were all grown together and so you had to beat your way through and make your own path. Once you got in the middle, there was no getting out. I got lost multiple times and only by listening to my mom's voice did i finally make it back out alive. Another setback was that since all the tree's were so close together it was hard to see around the whole tree to see if there were any holes in the tree. We finally found one that my Mom approved of, and we cut it down and dragged it out through the jungle to our car. Which was not an easy task seeing as it was just my Dad, Mom, Sister and I and the 2 little ones. So really it was up to Dad, Heather and I while Mom watched the kids. And that really translates into, it was really only my Dad doing all of the dragging. Heather and I just held back tree branches and cleared a path for him best we could. The saga doesn't end there though, after making it to the car we still had to wrap it up and attempt to put it on top of the car. Needless to say, that took awhile. It was an adventure. We measured the tree when we got home and it was a good 14 feet tall. When we were cutting it down my mom mentioned that she thought it wasn't tall enough! We only have 12 foot ceilings!! We had to cut some off and it made it a ton easier to bring inside the house, but the tree is still MASSIVE! It definitely made Thanksgiving memorable.