The day we went hunting for a Christmas Tree.

 

 

Where to begin? 

Oh, wait,  I know.  The beginning. 

First we went to purchase a permit.  I quickly learned that there are 2 types of Christmas Tree permits.  You can buy one from the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) or from the US Forest Service.  After looking at the maps, we chose to get a forest service permit. 

 

We waited a few weeks to go out hunting for it.

  

When we finally went we made a day of it.  We left early in the morning, and made many stops and hiked around in the snow looking for the right one. 

The entire family got along and we all agreed that everyone had to agree on the tree. 

Sometimes we took a break to do something fun! 

Finally!  We found the tree. I think we were all just getting hungry for lunch.  So we chose the best one we could see. 

We thought it was the perfect. and then…….

We got it in the truck then we realized we might have went a little “Clark Griswold”. 

 

We took the kids out to eat for lunch.  Which is hugely rare around here.  We rarely go out to dinner, let alone lunch.  We went to one of our favorite restaurants up in the mountains.   Everyone in there made comments about how big our tree was and how we were going to fit it in our house.

 

Getting to that…..

We had to practically cut it in half to fit it in our house. 

Once we got it in and decorated it it looks perfect, a little quirky, but perfect!

Here are a few of our favorite ornaments apart from the little red spiders we keep finding in it. 

 

This one is from the Capital Christmas Tree tour we took when they cut it down right near us.

This one has been one of my favorites for some time. My heritage is Scandinavian.  Painted eggs are a popular tradition of that.  This ornament is an actual egg decorated.  I store it very carefully and I am the only one allowed to put it on the tree.

This is our Santa Key, my mom purchased for the kids, since we don’t have a chimney. This is how Santa gets in.

I love the actual pinecones.

I also left our tree permit around the trunk as a decoration. 

This has been one of the more memorable things we have done seeing as it is also our first time ever using a real tree.

The kids have been really great about watering it too! 

As of now we are hoping to make this a tradition.

I even saved a slice of the trunk to make an ornament out of.  That will be our tradition, every time we cut a Christmas Tree down, we will take a slice of the trunk and create an ornament.