If you’ve been around here awhile, you’ll remember this post from last year, documenting our first-ever for-real Christmas tree experience. After ten years with an artificial Christmas tree, we’re now solidly on the REAL-X-MAS-TREES-4-LIFE team!! We had planned to make the drive to cut down our tree again this year, but things got busy, the weather looked rainy, and the Christmas season is short this year!! No time to waste!! So, we decided to make the two-minute trek over to our local DQ parking lot, where we could pick out a tree and be home in ten minutes! (WELL… It WOULD have been ten minutes. But we realized after we got there that we forgot all of our money… haha!! So ten minutes turned into twenty. Still!!)

The woman who sold us our tree was from northern Wisconsin. She just got married, her husband manages several Christmas tree farms, and they come down to Chicago for the holiday season. The whole lot smelled like fresh pine, and they gave us a small jar of maple syrup to take home (our kids were thrilled!). We ended up with a balsam fir this year, just to compare it with last year’s fraser fir. (The jury’s still out, but there are definitely a ton of pine needles all over our living room floor already, and last year, the fraser barely dropped a single needle! Just sayin’!) I’m loving how every year, our living room looks different and smells so good! Maybe one day, we’ll be back in Artificial Tree Wonderworld, but for now, it’s the real deal, all the way 😉