Oh Christmas tree

We went and got our Christmas tree the Sunday after Thanksgiving.  I always grew up getting our tree early and keeping it up until the new year......and for the past couple of years we've gotten our tree kind of late in the game.  So this year we got a very early start!  When I was a kid we would all hop into our 1970's conversion van and drive for what felt like hours to go hunt down and then cut down our perfect Christmas tree.  I would love to be able to do that with my little family, but trees are really expensive these days and we've found the best price ($29.99) to be at our local Food Lion (grocery store).  So we made the treck to Food Lion, Dan humored me and held up multiple trees for comparison, and we finally settled on a 7 1/2 foot decently full Frasier Fir. 

It was after the tree was paid for and on the roof of our car that we realized we had nothing to tie it down with!  Dan went back into the store to see if they had rope.  They did not.  But Dan bought some bungee cords and strapped our Tannenbaum down.  We had another stop to make before heading home, so we got on the highway (which out here is a 2 lane road with a speed limit of 45) and headed on our merry way.  It was about 10 minutes into our journey that we heard rustling up above our heads on the roof and I turned around in my seat just in time to see the Christmas tree flying off the back of our car and nearly hitting the car behind us.  The two cars behind us slammed on their brakes nearly having an accident themselves and while we turned around, one of those drivers moved our Christmas tree off the road.  We spent the next 15 minutes trying to located the bungee cords that flew off onto the side of the road (one of them was on the other side of the hwy) and retying the tree to the car roof.  Thankfully no one got hurt!  I would have freaked out if a 7 foot Christmas tree came hurdling at me while driving, but the cars behind us were fine, and actually thought it was pretty funny.  The tree didn't get run over, and really only lost 1 branch to the road.  We got home safely and our Christmas tree made it into the house.  Our tree never really drank any water and got very brittle very quickly......I think it was post traumatic stress from the incident! :o)

Here is my attempt at getting a picture with all 3 of my children at the "Christmas tree farm" aka Food Lion.

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