The Perfect Tree

Growing up in the Hinkle house, the Saturday after Thanksgiving was dedicated to going out, finding, cutting down and hauling home the perfect Christmas tree. Also, because our living room had vaulted ceilings, we kids always rooted for the BIG trees and many years they would end up being 10 - 15 feet tall! So, included with finding this perfect tree would be: lever and pulley it up to the living room, securing it to the wall in 2 spots, making sure it was square in the stand without breaking it and then taking lots of "stand back and look to see if it is straight" looks. All this and it still wasn't 100% that the tree would stay up. My parents and each of my siblings and I can all recall different years when the tree fell down, ornaments and all!

Even though it was probably a pain for my dad to do all the work of the lights, and a pain for my mom to haul out all the boxes of ornaments, and a nuisance to army crawl with a gallon of water every night to water the tree and a conundrum on how to dispose of such a beast each year; the memories that we made were priceless. Every Christmas I reminisce and am thankful that even though my parents would always bring along the measuring tape and say "this year we are getting a small tree" and every year we would return with a behemoth, that there wasn't a small part of them that was happy; because this was exciting, this was our something special, this was making memories!

For the last 6 Christmas's Paul and I have decorated our home with a small, artificial, pre-lit tree. This was practical in an apartment and on the occasions that we traveled at Christmas. Well this year, we are in our house, we aren't traveling (for the most part) and Nora is old enough to understand and enjoy the excitement of Christmas. So, the Saturday after Thanksgiving we loaded up the car with the appropriate tools; bungee cords, ropes, tarp, saw and no tape measure (!!!) and we headed out to find the first perfect Standen Christmas tree.

So many trees, so hard to choose!

Paul, hard at work chopping down our tree.

Nora and Liam had great fun getting "lost" in the woods.

Triumphant!

Not a behemoth, but the perfect tree for our house and family.

The ladies enjoyed a hot cup of cocoa as the boys loaded the trees on the cars!

I would say this year is a success...Nora squeals with delight every time we plug in the tree lights, she has her favorite ornaments that she looks at everyday and even though we didn't have to secure the tree to the wall to keep it vertical, it is still a beautiful and impressive tree!

Merry Christmas!