Our first Christmas tree!

On Sunday afternoon, K and I went got a start on decorating for Christmas. We visited a cute little Christmas store, where we bought quite a few nice ornaments, and then we headed to a tree farm to cut down our tree!

I've never had a real tree before. My dad is allergic, so it was never an option. K really wanted a real one, and I was excited to find a tree farm fairly close to us.

The tree farm was a quaint family-owned place. Since neither of us knew which type of tree we wanted, the workers were able to give us a few tips before they sent us out to survey the selection. They told us that people come out as early as the weekend after Halloween to begin staking their claims on trees! Some people had interesting ways of showing a tree was taken.

We couldn't believe how big some of the trees were!

I don't know if a lot of the average-sized trees were already taken, but it seemed that the trees were either 8 ft tall or 3 ft tall. I was glad we have tall ceilings in our living room! I had read an article that recommended buying a tree that's 6" to 12" from your ceiling. An 8-footer wouldn't quite be that height, but I figured it would be sufficient.

We found a tree that we were pleased with. It was a Leyland cypress, nice and full. There was one random stray branch on the side, but we could easily put that part at the back. The tree's height was good, and the top of it was really pretty. We found an employee who could cut the tree down for us. After he stood up from cutting down our tree, he bent over to pick up his saw from the ground ... and farted! I actually thought to myself, "It's a sign we found the right tree." (Hey, remember one of the biggest surprises I had once I got to live with K?)

When we got the tree home and inside the house, we were very glad that we hadn't gotten a tree any taller. I guess the stand (which isn't tall) added more than we'd bargained for. Thank goodness our neighbors had some good clippers! We trimmed the top of the tree and shaped it to hide our little alteration.

We put on Elf as we decorated the tree. As the movie was finishing up, so were we. K made us a couple mugs of hot chocolate, which we enjoyed during the final scenes of the movie. When we turned off the TV, we snuggled on the couch and surveyed our work on the tree with fresh eyes. We were pretty pleased with ourselves. K actually got a little teary-eyed, since after 4.5 years of being together, we were finally able to decorate our tree together. This will also be the first time we've been together for Christmas.

This is the most gorgeous tree I've ever had. I love that many of the ornaments are meaningful to us in some way, and I love that a lot of the decorations are new things we picked out last weekend. But the things about it I love most is that we chose it and decorated it together.