This weekend, I felt a bit like the Griswold family...ridiculous and over the top! As I wrote two years ago, http://siegristseven.blogspot.com/2012/12/letting-go.html Brian made this crazy arrangement with the children four years ago that if we "save" money and get a tree off our land then we can go out to dinner. As I mentioned, we have cedar trees....ENOUGH SAID!
So, all week I watched as people posted beautiful pictures of artfully decorated Christmas trees. Honestly, I began to feel a bit jealous...I knew a straggly, holey tree was about to be drug in my house to be decorated.
On Sunday, we bundled up the kids and off we went to tromp around our property looking for the "perfect" tree. Let me just say...on all 20 of our acres there is not. one. single. perfect. tree! In fact, there is not even a nearly perfect tree. I was worried of what the neighbors who drove by thought as we searched the front of our property. I mean, lets be honest, our large, diverse family already stands out in our gated community!!!! Now, we are tromping around carrying a saw in the freezing cold. WHAT. IS WRONG. WITH. THAT. FAMILY!
Finally, we agreed on a huge tree....way too tall to even begin to fit in our house. Brian and the kids drug it up the driveway. We chopped it in half and into the house it came. We strung it with white lights and decorated it with the breakable glass ornaments. We had our 2014 Christmas tree! In Chloe's words, "Its so beautiful, except for the tree!"
Admist this adventure, I realized that this has become a tradition....and, guess what, our kids look forward to it! They don't care that the tree is UGLY! They don't care that we could go to a tree farm and find a gorgeous, hole free tree! Honestly, they don't even care about going out to dinner (when I asked them they had forgotten that it was part of the deal). They just love to have a Christmas tree with their personal ornament adorning it! They just love the tradition of finding the "perfectly ugly" Christmas tree together as a family!
