Growing up, the Friday after Thanksgiving, my family would venture out to a Christmas Tree farm and cut down our Christmas Tree. It is just something that we did, don’t know why? But it was our tradition.

You see, I don’t have a lot of great memories from growing up because of issues between my parents, but the memories that I do have pertaining to going to cut down a Christmas Tree are some of my favorites.  I remember that my sister and I would pill into the back of our station wagon, yes, I just outdated myself, and we would go and cut down a Virginia Pine.  My sister and I would each pick out a tree and then our parents would decide which tree we cut down and took home. I sometimes don’t remember what I ate for lunch today, but I can remember running around the farm finding a tree just like it was yesterday.

As I have gotten older and even when I moved to Texas, I continued that tradition of going to cut down my tree after Thanksgiving. But, when I got married, I got married to someone that grew up having an artificial tree. I don’t ask for  a lot and I’m pretty accommodating, but I draw the line at artificial trees for Christmas and out of the 8 years that we’ve been together, we have a form of a live tree 7 of the 8 years.  And I say somewhat of a live tree because, for 5 years, we’ve purchased table top live Fraizer Fur trees.

But this year, this year was different and it was my wife’s idea. One day before Thanksgiving, she mentioned about us going to a Christmas Tree farm to cut down a tree for the boys. She thought that they were old enough and big enough, to not take down the tree. So, that is what we did, except for going and cutting down the tree, as we found a local farm that had some pre-cut trees. And thus far, the boys have loved the tree.

Every morning, as we bring the boys down to the living room, the first thing that they say, most time even before we get to the living room, can we turn on the lights? The boys have really seemed to enjoy the tree and lights and we even let the decorate the tree.

So to the start of new traditions and a future of getting a Christmas Tree together as a family and starting the Christmas season. And more importantly, I hope that this starts a family tradition for the boys, that will carry over to when they grow older and have families and children and can pass down this tradition as well.