This weekend, this family of churchpunks will embark on our annual adventure to locate our Christmas tree. We have a much better plan than the Griswalds did though. We drive out to a local tree farm and select our tree from out in the field. It is freshly cut and tied onto our car for us. We take it home and prominently display it in our living room where it fills our house with its piney aroma for the holiday season. This is the first year that my kids are both big enough to go with us to pick out our tree.
I grew up with an artificial tree . My dad was the master tree setter upper. The tree was never taken apart after it was initially put together and the lights were only removed if they stopped working. At the end of each Christmas season the ornaments would be removed from the tree and it would be carried to a dark corner in the basement where it would be covered and would stay until the following year. My dad did his part each year when he would retrieve the tree from the basement wrestling it all the way up the stairs and placing it in our living room where he would exclaim, “The tree is up!” and he would retreat to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. The rest of my family would fix the funny bent branches and proceed with decorating.
Faith and I have had a live tree ever since we had a place to call our own. The downside to having a live tree is that we can’t set it up and start decorating when I start getting the itch to go Christmas around November 1st. So we have to wait until December to go get our tree. One major bonus about waiting until December is that we usually go get our tree around our wedding anniversary. We will celebrate 6 years of marriage this year on December 6th. I don’t think that it is any weird coincidence that we were married on the feast day of St. Nicholas.
Picking out our Christmas tree is one of my favorite Christmas traditions. What are some of your favorite Christmas traditions?
