Other than a brief poultry assault on the back porch, it was a quiet weekend on the farm.

We had the Cowboy’s 7th birthday party–and I’ll have more to share about that tomorrow. And then we went Christmas tree hunting. It was cold. And raining. But we came back victorious.

This year we even had company. Ms. Maya and her youngest brother joined us for the evening after the party and were part of our tree hunting expedition.

We get our tree from a tree farm, but not from a Christmas tree farm. Ours comes from a lumber tree farm, which is full of good pines (which we don’t cut) and scrub pines (which is what we do cut). Christmas tree farms grow specific species of evergreens, space them very carefully, and spend a lot of time trimming them every year into their lovely conical shape. They don’t grow that way without help! Scrubby white pines from the path edge on a tree farm don’t grow like that. {smile}

They grow like 10 foot tall Charlie Brown Christmas trees! Sparse and crazy. It takes, like, one strand of lights to wrap the whole thing and there’s only enough branches for about 15 ornaments.

But they smell heavenly!

This year I was looking for a tree that was fuller, since every. single. ornament. is the crew’s favorite and they just want to hang them all.

Have you ever bought a piece of furniture at the store and when you bring it home it suddenly seems 10 times bigger? I’ve mentioned that we have a thing for antiques, right? This has happened to us numerous times! Probably half our furniture is not where it was originally intended for because it didn’t fit like we expected. But I digress…

Yeah, that!

This tree has the oddest shape. There’s just branches every which way, but mostly pointing straight up! And there’s these big gaps…it didn’t look like this in the woods, I swear! Mr. Fix-It and I talked about trimming it some more to make it fit better, but we weren’t sure we could risk taking any more branches off!

So we have to be very careful about opening and closing the front door. Good thing everyone knows to come to the mudroom! {smile} I did fit three strands of lights on it–1 strand of big bulbs and 2 strands of little bulbs. We do colored lights on the tree, but all our other decorations are white lights. The crew wanted to put even more ornaments on it, but I put them away when Speedracer started hanging them 5 in a row up and down the same branch.

I guess I should just let it go, but I’m still overcoming my years of decorating 7 foot tall, perfectly conical spruce trees–you know, where you never see the wires from the lights and you can fit boxes and boxes of decorations without anything overlapping…{smile}

How do you do your Christmas tree?