Tree Time!

In keeping with the trend...

This past Saturday Ryan and I went to get our Christmas tree. We invited my brother Bryan and his fiance Katy along to help. We seemed to have picked the perfect day - it wasn't too cold, but was just cool enough to make it feel right.

A guy that I used to work with (and Ryan currently works with) works at a farm down in lower Delaware. His wife's family owns the farm and so we figured we'd go there as we have in the past. Their trees are reasonably priced ($35 for any size), they're a very low-key operation (none of the fancy gift shops, etc that most other farms have) and so I feel good helping them out. I know that they don't get nearly as much traffic as some of the larger local tree farms, so every little bit helps.

They have multiple fields, but the field we had to chose from was the same as the one we picked from last time we went. All the trees in that area were a variety of sizes from little saplings to full grown. I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted. We had two options for our tree this year.

Option 1: Put the tree in the front room (the 'formal' living room). This room we NEVER go in. It has borrowed furniture, holes in the wall (where Ryan is fishing wires) and is not decorated at all. The benefits of this room though is that we could pretty much get any size tree we want and it'd be on display through our large front window (so suburban of us...).

Option 2: Put the tree in our family room. This is the room that we spend all of our lounge time in. It's (pretty much) totally remodeled, and would allow us to see the tree every day. This room would mean we had restrictions on how big we could go, Jude would possibly be crawling after the ornaments and all of our Christmas decorating would be centered in spot.

Up until we got to the farm, I had no idea which direction I'd go, so we just found the tree that we liked best and I figured I'd worry about the rest when I got home.

Here's Katy and Jude (all bundled up):

A little out of order, but here's (from the left) Bryan, Ryan, Neal and some other dude shaking the loose needles:

Here we are with our perfect Christmas Tree (my brother said that it was the most perfect pear shaped tree - he also said that they went to a more well-known tree farm, spent 10 bucks more than we did and they weren't AS happy with it... so...)

Here's Bryan and Jude chopping it down:

Our little family:

I insisted we get a picture of the three of us dragging the tree to the place where they bundle it up:

We ended up putting it in the family room... here it is all light up:

And of course our little man in front of it mid-decorating:

and with the flash this time...