We have five good reasons to drink!: Christmas Tree

Every year we go to a local christmas tree farm to pick out our christmas tree. Wintergreen farm in north texas is the closest cut your own tree farm to us. It's fun to have a family tradition to look forward to every season. This year we went on the Thanksgiving long weekend. Jeremy had to work on Friday so we went Saturday morning. The farm opened at 9am so our plan was to get there as early as possible for us so we can avoid the crowds. We pulled into the farm at around 9:25am, not bad, we got five kids up and ready and in the car in a relatively timely manner. Jeremy and I even stopped for coffee on the way up. We get there and I nurse Soleil before getting out, then get the wrap on and get her in it. Walk around to let Finn out and realise he doesn't have shoes. I did notice this when I was closing his door and even went in the house to get them.

We briefly considered just letting him walk around in socks but as soon as he was out of the car he was complaining about the leaves sticking to his feet and when we looked around we realised there was a lot of gravel for him to walk over. So back into the car we went and used the GPS to help us find a local store to stop at. We thought maybe we could find some crocs or something simple like that to get him through. The closest store (according to the GPS) was about 6 miles away, but we had to commit to it because it was in the opposite direction to McKinney where we knew where to find stores that sold shoes. So we drove the six miles to Whitewright TX and found ourselves in the 'main street'. Most of the stores were closed down, including the one we were looking for. So we decided to find the nearest big store, that ended up being Walmart in Bonham TX. We arrived in Bonham and saw the sign for Walmart and as we got closer saw the sign for a little shoe store. It was an easy decision to choose the shoe store over Walmart......we despise Walmart.

As we entered the shoe store we were greeted and informed of some great sales, unfortunately we didn't end up finding a show that was included in the sale, but that's ok. We spent probably half an hour looking for shoes for Finn and finally settled on a cute little pair of red converse. He loved them and boy did they look adorable on his little feet!

Finn's new shoes

Back to the tree farm for take two (seems that this holiday weekend had a take two theme). We arrived closer to 11 now and the place was already packed and they had us in overflow parking. We just went with the flow and headed over to get in line for the hayride. We missed one because of the number of people but they had prepared for crowds and quickly had a second hayride there which we did make it on. Finn was very excited to get on the hayride.

The next part is the difficult and time consuming part (maybe not as time consuming as forgetting shoes and going to buy new ones though). We wandered through the trees looking for the perfect one!! This took a long time, we all wanted to agree on the tree. We had a couple of ones we liked but had trouble finding THE one. Finally we came across one that was pretty perfect, straight trunk, dark needles, full but Madeleine didn’t like it. So we kept looking, and looking and looking. They all started to look the same, Finn started getting REALLY bored and asking to go home. We persevered and eventually came around to the perfect tree. We all agreed that it was good and settled on it! YAY! Don’t tell Madeleine but it was the same one that all but her had agreed on a little earlier but this time she had a hand in finding it which made it more perfect for her. Jeremy made the first cut with the hacksaw and then each child took turns cutting it down. When it finally fell Jeremy and Owen carried it to the side for the tree guy to pick up and bring back to the main building for us to buy and put on the roof of our car.

We got the next hayride back and while we waited for them to wrap and tie the tree down on the roof of our car the kids had hot chocolate and played in the leaves. They had a blast burying each other and making a huge pile. It didn’t go without some dirty looks from other parents but I’ll forgive them because their oldest kids were always only 3 or 4. One day their kids will be the age ours are and they’ll realize that looking down their nose at big kids having fun isn’t so cool anymore! It took a while but the tree was finally safely tied down and we headed home with our beautiful Christmas tree!

Soleil and I on the hayride