Oh Christmas Tree Oh Christmas Tree...

Today is the day! It is our family tradition to go find and cut down our Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving (barring any seizures, blizzards, or vacations). Last year we found a tree farm MUCH closer to our home - only a 10 minute drive. The weather was clear but a bit chilly. We bundled the kids up in the warm snow gear and started the hunt!

Logan was tired and was ready for a nap...Zach on the other hand had so much fun running around the trees with a bit of snow on the ground. Every tree we went to that was a potential candidate we would ask Zach if this was our Christmas tree, he kept replying, "no - we need a BIG tree". After about 15 minutes we found that "BIG" tree. This picture doesn't do it justice...it was at least 12 feet tall.

Zach was VERY pleased.....

Dustin did the honors of chopping it down with a chainsaw:


Then Zach and Dustin dragged that big 12 footer to the clearing so the tree farm owners could haul it to our truck on a 4x4. At this point Logan was fast asleep in Jen's arms....he missed the "fun" part!

The tree fit on top of the 4runner no problem.

Now getting that sucker into the house...that is a different story. We have had a few years of trying to get large Christmas trees into our home....this year was probably the easiest (we learn from past mistakes!). We had the tree in the garage. Dustin put the tree stand on the tree while it was in the garage and then wrapped and tied it with a large tarp. We then carried/dragged the tree from the garage through our front door. The tarp kept the tree and our front door frame protected from damage.

Once the tarp was removed we stood the tree up and made some minor adjustments to the position in the stand and TA-DA! The Gray family 2010 Christmas tree!

We decided to let the tree stand un-decorated for a bit to make sure it didn't fall down (incident from two years ago!)....