For five consistent years now, we’ve went and got a real Christmas tree for Christmas. We even had a real Christmas tree, the year I was in the hospital for Christmas. In case you didn’t know being in the hospital around Christmas is kinda a family thing, me thing. I was there for Keera’s birth in 2008, and then again in 2010 with pregnancy complications with Zaden. Then finally 2012 for surgery to fix my broken ankle and leg from falling down stairs.
When I think of getting a Christmas tree, I always imagine us going out to a Christmas tree farm.. or even out to the bush. You know like how you see it in the older movies, the family going out and cutting their own tree lol. I love movies like that, the old fashion family feels. Well so far that hasn’t happened… we usually end up going to a grocery store and buying a tree.
As the years go by it seems that, we end up waiting later and later to go get a tree. Christmas is a short nine days away, and we only just got our tree tonight. When you go buy a tree from the grocery store, they usually have them wrapped up. It’s hard to pick a good-looking tree, especially when you can’t exactly see what it looks like besides the height. The plan was to buy a tree last week, but schedules got busy.
So tonight we browsed around a couple of places, and made our last stop at Home Depot. I went inside alone to see what kind of selection they had, and noticed they still had quite a bit of trees left. All the trees had different type of coloured tape on them. Then I noticed the sign explaining what the different types of coloured tape meant, and how much the trees cost based on the tape colour.
When I got back to the van we headed home, so that we could take a seat out of the van. We needed room for the tree, since we didn’t want to put it on the roof. Once we finished doing that we headed back to Home Depot, it was about five minutes to 8 o’clock when we got into the store.
The moment we got in the store, a lady stopped us at the doors to tell us they’d be closing in five minutes. I asked her if we could just quickly grab a tree, and that’s it. She agreed and sent a man with us to “carry the tree”.
We told the kids they could pick the tree, and Zaden and Keera picked the one we got. It was light enough for Keera to carry, so we got her to bring it to customer service to pay. I ended up paying just under twenty dollars, including the tax.
Was it the perfect fairy tale way to pick out a tree as a family, no not really but I’m starting to roll with it. This might not be my fairy tale idea of picking out a tree, but this is OUR family way.
The kids were just as excited to get this tree, as they would have been to get another one. That’s what counts right, not some fake idea of how things should be…it’s about real life events.
If I want to have that “perfect” movie scene moment of us going to cut down our own tree, that’s on me to make that happen. Who knows though, when it finally does happen maybe it won’t be as magical as moments like these. Or maybe it’s up to me to change what my version of “fairy tale” perfect is.
When we got home, we took out our tree-holder. The tree was too small no matter how much we tightened the screws, so we headed out to Walmart. We bought a new tree-holder, and a new tree skirt because I thought our purple one would be too much for our tiny tree. Curious about our tree last year, CLICK HERE.
When we got home, it turned out that our tree wouldn’t stay in place with the new tree holder. So I did what any tired mom would do, I put the tree in our old holder and buried it with dirt. Yes you read that right, I buried our Christmas tree in our tree holder. Once I was done “replanting” the tree it didn’t budge 😛 , remember if there’s a will there’s a way.
We might have a small apartment tree, but it’s still ours. 🙂