Oh Tannenbaum

The wind howled and the snow was falling sideways more than it was falling down. The mercury hadn't quite climbed above 20 degrees, but there we were, out in the middle of a chunk of land surrounded by Christmas Trees. Several years ago we had sort of just fallen into what is rapidly becoming a tradition of visiting the Rees' Pine-Apple farm to gather our Christmas tree. I'm the only one in the family left who still gets a live tree every year. Despite my older brother's proclamations that he would never, in a million years, get some stupid plastic fake tree. But that was before they bought the fake tree. Although, in his defense, his youngest is allergic to about 98% of the things most people take too much for granted. If they wanted a Christmas tree, they had two options; go plastic, or get rid of the kid. I think they had more invested in the kid and really didn't want to see that investment go to waste. I feel for the guy, no real tree.

It was cold though, very cold. The kind of cold that makes you think mother nature has it in for you. Like she is doing her very best to kill you off right then and there. We found a great tree right away, but the 5/8 just couldn't admit that the tree was almost-but-not-quite the perfect Christmas tree. So we walked around that field of trees for what seemed like hours. Time always seems to last longer when you're freezing your...uh...nose off. I started to remember one year up in the Last Frontier when My 2 Cents and I went out and braved the Alaskan winter in an attempt to find a couple of trees for our families. He was sick, and not feeling good at all. I kept telling myself "I've been colder before, and I'll probably be colder at some time later in life." By the way, that almost kind of sort of works. We found what we though would be a pretty nice tree after wading through waist high snow (for again, what seemed like hours). We started to brush the snow away from the base so we could cut it down good and close to the ground. We cleared snow, and cleared snow and cleared more snow. Until we finally realized that what we were wanting to cut down was one huge tree and the part we thought would make a good Christmas tree was only the top 1/3 or so. There was no way that tree was going to fit on the old Cherokee, let alone in either of our places of residences. So, dejected and empty handed we trekked that multitude of miles yards back to the Cherokee, got in the old giant black beast, and headed back to The City. The women folk for some reason didn't seem too surprised that we hadn't cut down the perfect tree, and thought we were fools for not just buying one at the corner gas station.

But, like the snow on Saturday, I'm beginning to drift a bit. We walked around that tree farm until we had looked at pretty much every tree they had. We ended up getting the first one we liked anyway. We could have saved a bunch of body heat by grabbing that one the first time we saw it. The kids enjoyed the time though, and I have to admit, being cold wasn't all that bad. It was still good family fun. We had loaded up Little Sister's MP3 player with Christmas songs, and plugged the old "cd -> cassette" contraption in and sang Christmas carols all the way out there and back.