Little moments: Holiday update: tree-hunting adventures and awesome wrapping papers

The Christmas tree debate is one that takes place in our house every single year. I always want a real, freshly-cut tree, and Matt dislikes the tree cutting tradition. So we have a compromise that keeps both of us relatively happy: one year we get a freshly-cut Christmas tree, and the next we use the fake, home-made tree that my mom created.

2012 was supposed to be a real tree year, but Matt kept dragging his feet about it. He proposed getting a potted tree to decorate that we would later plant in our yard. This seemed like a fantastic idea until we found out that acclimating the tree to being inside would be a process (days in the garage, then days in a cold room in the house) and it wasn't recommended that we keep the tree inside the house for more than 4-5 days. So we gave up on that idea, and Matt finally accepted that we were going to Klicker's to get a tree.

The Sunday morning that we were going to get the tree Matt woke up with an idea. How about going up to the mountains and cutting a tree? After some investigating we found a place that was open on a Sunday that sold tree-cutting permits and off we went, adventuring in the snow. (FLASHBACK to the day before Nico was born!!!)

We found a place to park, and bundled up in our snow attires (how adorable are my two abominable snow men?):

After walking around for a bit we found a few choices and, after some serious consideration and playing close attention to the height of the tree (because no body wants a tree that's too tall for their house), we chose one and chopped it down. I carried the baby and held-on to the dogs (of course the dogs came!), and Matt carried the tree.

Matt found a suggestion online to wrap the tree up before tying it to the car, so we brought our canvas tarp for this purpose. When we went to wrap the tree, the canvas (which usually looks huge when we've used it in projects around the house) looked pretty small in comparison. This should have been a hint to the size of the tree (ooooh foreshadowing!), but we were too excited about the tree so we just wrapped it up and Matt tied it to the top of the car.

(I think it looks pretty small in this picture...)

When we got home, Matt got the tree on the tree stand (still wrapped up in the tarp) and brought it in the house. It was the perfect height! And so we untied the tarp, and BOOM! the tree opened up and branches reached across about 3/4 of our living room! Ooooooops...

So we took off about a foot off the bottom of the tree, and got rid of about two layers of branches from the bottom, and even though it was still pretty big we decided it was okay to have the tree take over our living room since it was Christmas and we would only have the tree for a couple of weeks.

And it was a perfect tree (in my opinion)! It definitely wasn't a Charlie-Brown-Christmas-tree, but it also wasn't super dense. I was happy with it. And Matt was happy with it. And I think it looked lovely. And Nico loved the lights!

So the three was a highlight from our Christmas holiday. And so were the super delicious cookies that Matt made (all in one day!) for our little gift boxes. There were Russian Tea Cakes, and Biscotti, and Thin-Mint-like cookies, and Jelly Drops, and Bourbon Balls.

And then there were the gifts. Nico made out like a bandit... it was ridiculous! We actually started opening gift the day of Christmas Eve to spread out the excitement and not overwhelm him, but at the end of it all he was still overwhelmed.