Beginning to look like Christmas

Ryan and I had a busy weekend this past week. We also reached, what I think, is something of a milestone. We have been married for 7 years, and this year we got our very first Christmas tree.

Saturday started with a trek up into the hills with Chad and Angela for some Christmas pictures. In spite of the snow that kept sticking to hair and getting in eyes, we got some great pictures.


Then Ryan and I went over to BLM land to harvest our tree. Finding the BLM office in Pocatello in order to buy a tree permit was an adventure all on it's own. I was by myself and it took me 1 stop to ask directions and 2 phone calls to Ryan to finally locate the place!

Anyway, back to tree hunting! I think the first one we found ended up being the keeper. We knocked the snow off of it to see how it looked, and were pretty happy with what we found, but we had just arrived and wanted to look around a little more. So we moseyed up the trail, searching for anything under 10 feet that looked moderately symmetrical, and always saying, "maybe the next one, maybe the next one." After a short while of this--it was cold and we had to be home by a certain time anyway because of out-of-town visitors--we went back to our first tree and decided that it was the best we'd seen.

Idn't it a pretty tree?

The mighty hunter with his kill.

We had to chop off a few of the base branches, and a bit off the top (the top spindly branch was about a foot too high) and it fit perfectly.

Decorating had to wait though, I had a carrot cake to make and we had my Dad, brother-in-law, and brother-in-law's high school buddy, stopping by to say, "Hi," on their way back from Spokane. That was a whirlwind visit!

Here's the cake.

They stayed only long enough to rest a moment, tell us how the drive has been, admire the antlers from Ryan's September bull, and then they left.

The carrot cake is for Ryan's birthday, which was put on hold for his comprehensive exams. There was no way we were celebrating a birthday while he was so busy studying for those tests. So, we had the cake last Saturday, and we still have it now, actually. It's a big cake, and so dense!

Sat. night, or maybe Sun. we decorated the tree. That was so much fun. I thought we might have enough ornaments, but that we might need to go to the Dollar Tree for a few extra. I was surprised to find that we had the perfect amount. The slightly scrawny nature of the tree saved us from having too many branches to decorate. I love Charlie Brown Christmas Trees!

Needless to say, since we'd never had a tree before, we also had never bought Christmas lights before. We didn't get those until Tuesday. This entire acquiring and decorating of the tree business has been kind of a step by step process, but so much fun!

Here's the tree with lights.

The tree skirt is actually about two yards of unsewn fabric that came from a whole pile of fabrics that Mom gave me. I had completely forgotten that some of that stuff was Christmasy. So when I started digging through my fabric Rubbermaid I was looking for something green; anything that might be appropriately-ish colored. And I found this:

Perfect!