Foraging for Trees

So I'm blogging my way back a little bit, but I wanted to post our trip to get a Christmas tree. This is the first year since moving out of my parents, that we had a real tree for Christmas. I don't know if I am secretly a tree hugger at heart (those darn Oregonian roots!), but it just seems a little sad to grow this poor little seedling, for how many years, just to chop it down and throw a bunch of decorations on it, so it can sit in your living room for 2 weeks. I have no problem with people doing it, it just doesn't get me all excited (I prefer my $35 Rite Aid plastic special. Years of enjoyment for the price of a real tree!).
So Dave has been begging me for the last several years to finally do it and I stopped fighting it. We went to Davis Ranch, a few miles from our house, and cut our own. We drove in and I was pretty impressed that we could pick any tree they had for $35. Not bad! As we started our search I quickly realized why. Their trees looked like they had been growing in a desert wasteland (hmm, I guess Sacramento does qualify for that one) and had hardly ever seen the shine of pruning shears. Don't get me wrong, there were several really tall, geargeaous trees, but I don't think they were actually Christmas trees. They looked like something you might use to create a hedge in your yard. Oh well.
So, we found a reasonable looking tree and shoved it into our car and took it home. When we pulled it our and started trimming some of the branches off the bottom I noticed this unusually large collection of needles. As I tried to brush it off, I saw the dreaded white!!! It was a spider nest! UGH! I did what any strong woman would do; I screamed my girlish scream as best as I could and ran out of there. ANd we are supposed to keep this in our house? What, till the little hatchlings are making babies of their own all over my living room? I was just waiting for that squirrel from Christmas Vacation to come jumping out at me!
We managed to clean it up and get it in the house, (although neither of us ever remembered to put water in it. Funny, it still looks the same though. I guess coming from around here it is used to never seeing moisture).
It wasn't really that bad and the kids had a great experience, so I'm sure it won't be the last live tree we get, but maybe next year could we do the artificial thing again???

Christmas Day!

Here are some pictures of our Christmas. I can't tell if they look any better on my new camera or not. I took quite a bit more than normal though, since it shoots much faster. It was lots of fun seeing the kids so excited for Santa and watching them open all the presents. I think next year we should scale it down a bit though. It is just toy overload with Logan's Birthday right before (and we even kept his birthday presents minimal), but it was fun. It was much quieter (if you can actually consider 5 kids quiet) than usual at Grandmas this year, since some of Dave's siblings had other plans for Christmas day, but it was fun.