Good Ol' Tree

I love our Christmas tree. I love that when it's convenient to us, we can go down to the garage, pull the box out of the shelf and begin to set it up. But one year I would like to go and get a real tree. And I mean a real "wild" tree from the mountains, not one from a parking lot or a perfectly engineered one from a tree farm. To drive up, do some bush whacking and bring back our little Charlie Brown tree. So this was the year. Shawn was up to it, the weather was right, we were ready to roll. Until we let the boys in on our plans. "WHAT!!" "You mean we are not putting our Christmas tree up!!" "I like our tree, we always put up our tree." "This is terrible, we already did not put our tree up the day after Thanksgiving like we always do, now we are getting a different one!! It's all ruined!" Woha!! I sure did not expect this. I love traditions and I always hoped that the boys would grow to love them as well, now it came back to bite me.

The tradition of putting up our tree lives on.

So here is our tree hunt . . .

. . . hunting for the right branch that comes next.

The boys put up the tree by themselves and after I strung all the lights, which took way too long if you ask our elves, the decorations came up faster that you can say "Christmas tree".

I really wanted to leave the decorations as is, but the tree looked a little lopsided, so I had to re-arrange it a bit.

I'm leaving the Nativity scene as it should be though, with everyone gathered really close to Jesus. There might not be room in the Inn, but there is plenty of space in the stable.