"O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree..."

-Day 8 of 31-

Oder auf Deutsch, "O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum..."

Yup.  It's that time of year again.  The time when for some strange traditional reason we stomp out into a field of somewhat manicured evergreen trees and select one that we think would be better suited to our living room with a bunch of strings of lights strung up all over it and zillions of little trinkets hanging from its branches.  Damn...when I put it that way it kinda puts a damper on the whole thing huh?  How nice of me to start out this post being cynical.  :-)

Ok ok...I love Christmas Trees and love having one...even if I won't actually be here that day.  Whenever I've had a Christmas Tree it's always been a real one...wherever that has been.  There were a couple times that I didn't get a tree in the years since I've no longer lived with my folks in Winchester.  I've lived in my current place for 3 years now and this is the 2nd tree I've had.  I would've had one the first year but I had to settle for two fake, plastic trees about 2 ft high next to my desk in Afghanistan.

Kinda hard for Santa to fit much under these.

 This year I once again trudged out to Butler's Orchard near Germantown, MD with Amos and Abi on an unseasonably warm and sunny day.  Once on the farm we came to a "T" intersection.  Left would take us to the White Pines while right would take us to the Douglas Firs.  We began our "hunt" in the Douglas Fir section.  After a short bit of time wandering around I wondered what else there might be and if maybe we'd go get their tree first.  Amos seemed to miss the "White" part on the sign and just thought "Pines"...meaning possibly Scotch Pines or something similar (it was about a $10 difference between the two).  I wanted to check out the "Pines" as well and see what the other options were.

Welcome to the Land of Misfit Pine Trees

Wow.  The White Pine area had some interesting characters.  Plenty of decent White Pines if that's your thing, but I've always been told they have problems holding ornaments...meaning, they really don't hold them at all.  We never had one growing up for this reason...we had zillions of ornaments between all of us kids (5 of us) and my parents.  We did come across a few Scotch Pines, if you want to call them that.  They were "trees" in the biological sense.

Is it a pine tree or a cactus?

I wish I could say this "top-heavy" tree and the one above are the same tree...they aren't!

 We wisely decided to head back to the Douglas Fir area.  We finally settled on our trees after probably an hour or so of searching pretty much the farthest reaches of the place and then debating between one waaaaay over here and one waaaaaay over there. It's all part of the experience right?  Sure.  Thankfully we remembered to grab a saw and didn't have to dig them out Clark Griswold style.

Cutting down my tree.

I found a way to drive the Subaru reasonably close to where we were so we didn't have to carry them over-the-river-and-through-the-woods.  We had the guys give them the good mechanical shaker treatment that takes out a lot of the dead needles and then we had 'em wrapped up so we could strap 'em to the top of the Subbie.

Before shakin' and wrappin'

My tree being wrapped up...Abi standing on my car in the background doing God only knows what.

"Yeah, I think they'll stay!"

Once we got 'em to our respective homes there was the usual trim work and fitting them to the stand.  Then there was some fine tuning after we actually stood the trees up.  Thankfully there were no real complications.  Amos' was a little tall for his ceiling but we took care of that in short order.

My tree in my place.

Amos getting his juuuust right.

So hopefully tomorrow I'll get mine all decorated with a zillion lights and plenty of ornaments.  Looking forward to spending the afternoon doing that while watching some football and whatnot.  Hmm...wonder what tomorrow's post might be about???