Oh Christmas Tree

So, in the spirit of trying to create our own traditions as our own family unit, and doing things that we've always wanted to do, we decided to drive out into the mountains and chop down our first Christmas tree. Yes, we did this all the weekend before Thanksgiving, but in our defense between Thanksgiving and an army mandatory yellow ribbon weekend, this was our only chance before halfway through December, and we wanted to enjoy our Christmas tree for longer than 2 weeks.

So during the week we went to Cal Ranch and bought our Christmas tree permit and hand saw and Saturday morning we woke up and got ready for our trip up to the Mesa Falls area to find our "perfect" Christmas tree. We packed our coats, snow/hiking boots, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and cameras and hit the road. The drive there was pretty and quite uneventful, though we had no idea that Ashton has seen so much snow already.

We parked because I said I thought I saw a few good trees, and hiking up the bank to check out the trees. The ones I saw actually turned out to be pretty thin and sparse, not great for decorating, so we wandered a bit farther and bam, there it was, our Christmas tree. At first we were afraid that it would be over the 12 feet limit (our permit only was good for up to 12 feet), but after comparing it to Eric's height, we decided that we were good.

Here are some pictures and a video of how it went down.

Shaking the extra snow off the tree so he wouldn't get doused when he cut it down.

Glad I didn't have to help with this part, I'm too short :)

Look Eric's capote and the wool blanket we used to cover the tree match!

Eric wrapping lights around our tree.

It was a great day so much fun cutting down our own tree and decorating it, and we only got the car stuck in the snow three times :) We were grateful that Eric decided to buy that shovel you see in the first picture, and for 4-wheel drive.