Oh Christmas Tree.....I *heart* Clark Griswold

I look forward to this day every year!!! Picking out our Christmas tree!!! We always go on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and always to the same tree farm up in North Bend. It's usually a fun and easy process - we search for our tree (usually takes 15-20 minutes to find a good one), Quinn gets the tree up onto the truck and then we go inside the tree farm cabin to see Santa.

BUT...this year not so easy. The trees were totally picked through. After almost an hour we still hadn't found "the one". So, we went inside the cabin there to warm up and visit Santa. BUT...Santa wasn't there yet and they didn't know when he'd arrive. So...out for more tree searching.



Then we found it! Our tree! It was kind of hard to gauge because they had cut the branches off the bottom few feet of the tree; but the top of the tree was perfect. Quinn started cutting. Once we got it down we could tell it was much bigger than it looked! It took the two of us to get it in the truck and down to the baler (this story is already way too long so I won't go into the details of how funny and frustrating it was trying to get it into the truck! :) We got it baled, and tied onto the truck and went in to see Santa. Garrett gave Santa a handmade pipe cleaner bracelet with 9 jingle bells on it (one for each reindeer) that he made. Garrett asked Santa for a tent trailer (he loves camping) or a snowboard, Nathan asked for a trampoline or an Xbox 360. So sweet!


We finally got the tree home and when Quinn took it off the truck we started to worry about just how tall it really was. We pulled out the tape measure and realized it was 2 feet too tall to fit in the house!! Hysterical. We are SUCH Griswolds! Quinn chopped a foot off the bottom and a bunch of branches off the top and it fit within a quarter inch of the ceiling. It is huge. It totally doesn't fit in the living room. It is SO funny. It's so big that the four sets of lights I had wouldn't cover the whole thing. So, we've put on lights and decorated about 2/3s of the way up. The top of the tree is bare. I've bought two more sets of lights but neither set matches the ones already one the tree. Beyond frustrating! Seriously! I will post pictures once the tree is completely decorated.




I need to take some pictures of the lights on the house too. Last year I bought a cool light system that syncs the blinking of the lights with Christmas music that it plays through speakers on the front porch. We covered the house of white lights. SO PRETTY! Quinn is my Clark Griswold. Love him! (especially when he climbed on the roof to put the lights on the eaves!). He didn't even get upset when the lights burnt out fuses the first three times we plugged them in.


I love Christmas!