Guess who hadn't ever cut down a christmas tree? right, ern's family tradition is assembling the tree from the tree-box. my family tradition is slogging through the mud and cold to cut down a tree on a tree farm. since we played pictionary till after midnight last night we got a pretty late start. after dropping some stuff off at her aunt and uncles, we stopped by my parents house to pick up a tarp + rope + bunjee cords. my dad instead let us borrow his pickup truck. we ended up at a fairly large tree farm, after a few misguided crap-farms with slim pickin's and dreary atmosphere. the one we ended up at had quite a few trees that were good looking. you aren't allowed to cut down trees without price tags, which was unfortunate. what was fortunate, however was discovering ern's super power of the day: finding perfect trees without price tags. we've yet to figure out a way to exploit this. we decided that the farm didnt have the Tree For Us so we started slogging back to the truck. as we approached the main thing you walk up, we found our tree. as luck would have it, it was the very first tree anyone sees as they walk up the main thing towards all the trees. we completely forgot to look. as we were cutting it down some wiseass walks up and says "hey, that's my tree" in a way that made us think it actually was. we joked with him for a while and let him know about the lack of price tag thing. he was of the mind to just take the price tag from one tree and move it to another. we were astonished, that's cheating christmas! so tree was paid for, ern got some hot cider for me and i man-muscled the tree into the truck. we took our coupon for free apples to twin hills apple farmery and wandred around the small town craft-crap.
so, here's the deal. each of us have several ornaments that we've received as gifts over the years, but not a whole tonne. we went to target and picked up 144 of these little round bulb things and several strings of lights and a tree topper. then walmart for tree skirt and tree stand. after that we dropped my dad's truck off and ended up staying and having dinner with them.
ern ate beef, i saw it with my own eyes. a-ma-zing. it was a struggle getting the tree to stand in the treestand so i took it outside and sawed off more branches until we could get it to stand without help. finally we got it all set up. we put it where the easy chair usually is and moved the chair to the back room.