the tale of a 12' christmas tree.

Marriage can be an interesting thing...especially when it comes to the holiday season.  Who goes where, who does what...it can be a hot sticky mess.  Thankfully, our biggest disagreement this season was which type of live Christmas tree was the best. Peyton thought it was a white pine, but I quickly reminded him that a fresh North Carolina Fraser Fir was the ONLY way to go. After all, my friend Olivia has a great choose-and-cut Christmas tree farm that I have visited for the past three years.  It only made sense that we get a Fraser Fir!

So Peyton kindly obliged (with the bribery of endless cheese curds from Ashe County Cheese) and we started our trek up the North Carolina mountains. We saw some snow, stopped at a few local destinations, got the holy cheese curds, then started our way to Olivia's farm.

After chit-chatting, catching up with her family, and wandering around the farms looking for the best tree possible...we finally settled on this beauty.

A 13ft. tall x 9ft wide tree.  (pardon the blurry photo...it was cold. it was getting dark. and oh crap. we forgot the nice camera, let's take some quick pictures on our phone.) After the photograph of the year was taken, we quickly gathered the Twin Pines Nursery crew of five and began cutting this thirty year old tree. The chainsaw went through halfway...then stopped. Dear Lord... help us all. 

So we went to the opposite side and began sawing again. It finally came crashing to the ground and at that point I realized that tree was ours.

We were going to have to take that tree home and put it up in our house. 

Yep. That's what my face looked like the entire four hour ride home. I wanted a tall tree, Peyton wanted a fat tree. We both got what we wanted. We compromised...that's what we are supposed to do in a marriage...right?

At the sacrifice of getting a 12ft North Carolina Fraser Fir Christmas tree...ABSOLUTELY.

I digress. 

After some trimming and sticking the trunk in a washtub full of water until we figured out what we were going to do, we managed to get our tree in the house with just three people. Surprisingly, it stood on it's own and was a sturdy little Christmas tree. We have yet to decorate it with our ornaments, but here it is for now.  Such a sweet little beauty.

P.S. Does anyone else struggle taking great pictures of their Christmas tree?!?