One of my favorite parts about the holidays is getting a tree. I've never been as much of a fan of decorating it or anything but the picking it out with the whole family is a tradition I very much enjoy. Usually, living in the suburbs, we would go to a lot and pick a tree out that had already been cut but there were a couple of years when we went to a farm and picked out and cut our tree. These years were a lot of fun because there was a new dimension to the picking out of the tree--it felt more like ours since we were the ones that cut it down and took it home rather than some impersonal middle man.
What really sticks with me, though, is pulling out the trees from the stands in the lot and shaking them out to see their shape--reaching a hand in among the laurels and then spinning it around to look at it from all sides, your hand smelling of sap when you retracted it. These years my mom makes a contest of it to see how fast we can get in and get out with the perfect tree--we go to Home Depot and essentially race ourselves to see if we can outdo last year's search. Last year we were especially successful (I wasn't there for the actual activity but I did, of course, see the tree and hear the story) and the tree was gorgeous in every way and, allegedly only took 15 minutes and $30 to buy.
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