The Hunt for Our First Christmas Tree!

After we gobbled up all the turkey, ate all the pumkin pie and took a long nap we decided it was time to go out into the cold and search for our "perfect" Christmas tree. Friday night we headed down to Delta Utah to stay at Grandmas Skidmore's house. We were joined by Kent and Lisa, Ryan and Jen, Karen and Guy, plus all of their kids. It was a packed house, but a lot of fun!! We got up Saturday morning and gathered all of our stuff. It was chilly out but not too cold; in the distance we could see that it was snowing in the mountains...all of the kids were so excited for the snow, we were all hoping that this would be the best tree hunt ever. As we got to the base of the mountain, it had snowed just enough to kick the car into 4 wheel drive. We all bundled up so we could head out in looks for our first tree.

We headed up the Mountain with Kent and Lisa. We were determined to find a tree before they would, but it was not our lucky day to be first. They found one and were down the mountain before we had even picked out our tree. While we were on the hunt a great big snow storm hit us. In every direction we had snow coming at us, it made it difficult to hike the mountain. We were glad that we had some hot chocolate to keep us warm just in case we got stuck up there. At one point we thought we had the most perfect tree on the mountain. But when we looked at it closely it was dead on one side. Finally as we were starting to loose faith in finding the tree we would really want, Taylor found it. Of course it had to be the one that was at least 30 feet tall. So Taylor started cutting down the tree. He started by cutting an area down so he could climb it. What we should have done was cut the whole tree down but we didn't realize it until it was too late. We cut the top half of the tree down. The sad thing is when it fell it hit the ground breaking some of the top branches off. It turned out all good though. We ended up putting that side against the wall, you would never know that there were missing branches. We also played doctor and drilled in some branches to help the tree look more full in some areas where braches were broken. Other than that it was the perfect tree. Once we got the tree chopped down it was a process to get it to the truck. We had worked ourselfs quite a ways away from where everyone was at. We ended up leaving the tree on the side of the road and picked it up on our way home. We hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving and that you will enjoy this Christmas season!!