Sunday, December 6, 2009

Oh Christmas Tree Oh Christmas tree



It's Official: The Holidays are here and with that comes Christmas trees. Well, this isn't our first rodeo with getting a Christmas tree and keeping it alive. For those of you who don't know the story of our first Christmas tree let me catch you up to speed. In 2008, this being our first holiday season as a married couple, we were very enthusiastic about the whole decorating thing and couldn't wait to get our Christmas tree and begin our own traditions. We began the day by heading out to buy all the supplies one should need to decorate the tree with all our left over gift cards from the wedding. We found ourselves shopping a little north of Seattle and saw a Christmas tree lot and decided to pick one up as long as we were in the neighborhood knowing that it might be a little drive with a tree on the roof of our car. We picked out a tree but to our surprise there was no one in sight to help us get the tree on our car or help us at all for that matter so we made due with the situation and asked to borrow some twine from them and we figured we could get the tree on top the car by ourselves........well I'm here to tell you it is harder than it looks. We got the tree on top of the car but we forgot to open the car doors when we were tying the twine and stringing it through the windows. It makes it kinda hard to get in your car when its tied shut!! After we were able to secure the tree and get into our car, we headed out on the open road of I-5 to get home but as luck would have it, it was incredibly windy and we could hear the tree slipping off the car and since we were not confident in our homemade twine job we pulled over and went the back roads home....which takes a lot longer!! Once we got home, we got the tree in the stand and straightened out and we were ready to decorate but in all the hussle and bustle of this we totally forgot to have the bottom of the tree trimmed off so that it would stay alive longer but we thought "o-well" do you actually have to do that? Take it from the Friedrichs, YOU DO!! Not two weeks later our tree was so dead that when you touched it a whole branch of pine needles would fall off and be laying at your feet just staring you in the face saying, "you idiot you should have had me trimmed!" So with my parents coming in just a few short days, Scott and I wanted to make the perfect Christmas so we decided that we needed to get a new tree, but that was a chore all by itself. We decided after work one night we would set out on the journey again. By the time Scott was home, I had the tree undecorated so that all we had to do was drag out the old one, hop in the car, pick out a new one, and redecorate....sounds simple enough right? Well we got the old one out of our place but not without a graveyard of pine needles laying everywhere but we thought we would wait to clean them up until after we got the new tree in the house...so we were off in search of a new tree. We found a tree lot close to our house, picked out a new tree and waited patiently while the sawwed off the trunk of the tree to make sure it would stay alive. While we were waiting, we noticed how unusually cold it was for Seattle and we had heard through the grapevine that it might snow, but we were too concentrated on getting a new tree to care. They loaded the tree on our car for us and we got it home and in the apartment with little mishaps. But there was still all those old pine needles needing to be cleaned up, so while Scott cooked us some dinner, I got out the vacuum cleaner and got to work. BUT you should know that those household items are not meant to suck up that many needles!! I broke our vacuum half way through the cleaning process and I finally broke down just as the vaccum started to smoke....but Scott helped out and we got the tree up and running again just was we went to bed around midnight. As we awoke the next morning, we slept in just a little too long and as we opened our curtains, the entire city of Seattle was covered in snow; which meant that both of us were going to late for work since Seattle seems to shut down when the city even mentions snow........so that was last year!

This year we new exactly what we needed and were all ready for the adventure. We got home from the east coast late last Saturday night but we woke up early on Sunday since we were still on east coast time. We decided to make the most of it and go get our tree. Well we headed to get some coffee and we passed a nursery that had a big sign for Christmas trees so we thought we would stop and see what they have. To our surprise, they had a ton of trees and very helpful staff. We picked our tree and they took it and cut the bottom off, put a stand on it and made sure it was straight, put a net around and loaded it to the top of our car and then they opened all the doors and professionally twined it to the roof of our car. We were home with a Christmas tree in a stand with little to no pine needles in less than an hour. We consider ourselves pretty much professionals now so here is what our tree looks like (sorta)..........Happy holidays!!!

1 comment:

  1. Your Christmas tree looks great! I am impressed that you have that many wrapped presents under your tree already. We don't have any - but won't since we have to take our tree down before the 23rd anyway.

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