Our holiday tradition is to spend the day after Thanksgiving going for a walk as a family to #optoutside, and then putting up our Christmas tree while Bing Crosby plays in the background. This past week the wife and I spent some time looking around for a better artificial tree then the one I had before we got married. It was kinda small and was starting to look a big ragged.

After pursuing some very expensive trees at local stores we decided to go the complete opposite direction and get a real tree. This is the first time that I’ve ever owned a real tree in my life, and the first time in a long time that Lisa has had one. So we headed out Friday morning and hit the local Home Depot for our first real Christmas tree together. We picked out a nice Balsam Fir, and proceeded to get it attached to the roof of our car. In the future, if we do this again, I’m going to just borrow a friend’s trailer. It will make it much easier to strap down.

We got it home and proceeded to set it up. Honestly it was easier than putting together a fake tree, and making sure you get all the limbs inserted in the right slots. It wasn’t really any less messy either, since our fake tree shed like crazy as well. Once we got it in place we proceeded to put up the decorations and we now have a wonderful smelling living room, and a nicely decorated, real, Christmas tree.

We’ll see how we feel about things in a month or so, but I felt like this was so much easier than a fake tree, and now I don’t have to store anything for another year. I’m really happy we made the choice to go real this year.