Christmas Traditions

One thing that was so important to me once I got married was to create some traditions..things that Mr. Allan and I love to do and will eventually share with our families and pass down to our kids. Christmas is the perfect time to start some new ones! I feel like my family doesn't have these yearly traditions that I can't wait for. We never got together at Aunt so and so's house for a big Christmas eve get together or did this special thing on Christmas morning. In fact, I can remember my Dad trying to get family together for a Christmas Eve open house once we got a little older and were in college and maybe 1/8 of them showed up. Things like that kind of make me sad and realize that we're lacking a bit in the tradition area. So, the past few years, Mr. Allan and I have set out to create our own. This is one of my favorite ones...the chopping down of the Allan Family Christmas tree. It's something we started once we moved into our house...mostly because there's a Christmas tree farm every 20 feet off the road we live on. It's something I positively love to do. We're pumped with holiday spirit, we sing Christmas carols off the cheesy station that starts playing them way too early the whole ride there, and then we get to the very serious task of picking out the perfect tree.

Mr. Allan plowing through the acres of trees....

Every year we think we find a tree...but we need to look a little more and use the tree we think is it as a comparison. Mr. Allan always whips off a hat or glove to mark it, so if we find a tree we think is better, we can run back to the first..I know..we take our tree hunting a bit serious... 

After searching around for another 20 minutes, the hat tree was deemed to be it!

This is pretty random...besides having to watch where I step so I don't fall in the hole where a tree used to be...you have to watch out for the random animal vertabrae as well...ewww...

Usually we chop ourselves, but there was a very enthusiastic 9 year old kid who followed us around for the first ten minutes and told us about 5 times he could chop it for us..Mr. Allan lending a hand...

 Christmas tree farm was complete with new furry baby cows too

Finally...the tree was home, trimmed, put in the house...and the stand off with our cat, Reese, began.....

 Finally.....our tree. It's funny how everyone has their specifics when it comes to tree decorating. For us...we're not garland or tinsle people..I'm not a fan of it and our cats like to eat it and throw it up. I remember one of my first holidays with Mr. Allan when we actually got a tree...he was so specific that it couldn't be this disaster unstylish tree and that we needed to stick with a theme. So, the Allan tree is red, silver, and gold every year...we like to put as many lights as we can on it and as many ornaments as the poor sucker will hold!