If you are coming from I Should Be Mopping the Floor, welcome to the next stop on the Christmas Traditions Blog Tour! I hope you are enjoying the tour, the magic of the season, and spending time with family and friends. A big thank you to Rachel at Like a Saturday for inviting me to join along, it has been so fun looking down memory lane to create this post!
When I think of Christmas and holiday traditions, one of my favorite things to do is decorate the Christmas tree. Something changes in the heart with a tree enters a home. My whole life, I have decorated real Christmas trees, and the same goes for my husband. We got lucky, because that meant we both wanted to continue with the tradition of getting real trees after we got married. It’s funny how those things really stick with you. When you grow up finding, bringing in, and decorating a real tree, it’s hard to ever do anything else. And we don’t intend to!
In my family, we always did the same thing around the holidays. We would got to church on Christmas Eve, head to Grandma’s house for dinner, wake up in our own house with just the four of us (my parents and my sister), eat pecan rolls, open presents at home, then head back to Grandma’s house to spend the rest of the day with family. It was that way my whole childhood and it was glorious.
Then, I graduated from college and moved to a different state with my husband and things became very different. There was no consistency, sometimes we didn’t see family because of work schedules and being long distance. Other years we traveled to see family, but rarely did we wake up in our own home on Christmas morning. We have also moved a lot with Steve’s job and one Christmas came and went while we were living in a hotel room. Thankfully we were able to drive to my sister’s that year and enjoy her real tree!
But one thing we have always, always done is get a real Christmas tree. Even when we lived in small apartments when we were first married, we managed to bring trees home. I remember one year Steve was out in our apartment hallway with a real Christmas tree and a kitchen knife sawing down the tree trunk (because at that time we didn’t have any tools!). I’m lucky I married a guy that was as dead set on a real tree as I was.
I know so many people are allergic to real trees or don’t want to deal with the hassle and mess and watering, but for us and our family we will always have real. There is nothing like the smell of a real tree. There is nothing like the beauty of a real tree. There is nothing like choosing that perfect real Christmas tree.
I wish we had some amazing story about how we cut down our Christmas trees (Griswold style), but the reality is that we usually choose one from Lowe’s. With small kids and moving so much, this has sort of become what we do, and now I feel strange changing that up. Maybe one of these years we will cut down our own, but for now we are happy to just get one in the house without any spiders or animals inhabiting it! We also love a Frasier Fir, and those don’t grow in Kansas!
Next, head on over to Decor and the Dog for more Christmas Traditions! Thanks for stopping by!