A New Tradition

Last year I went to a local nursery and picked out a tree for our living room to decorate for the holidays.  This year, Dave found out that his company allows employees to cut down Christmas trees on their private property, so we set out this morning (Starbucks in hand, yuppies that we are) to hike up and get one for ourselves.

We drove nearly two hours up near Breckenridge to access the property where we could pick out our tree for the year.  The snow capped peaks of the Gore range offered a gorgeous landscape on an unseasonably warm fall day, and we laced up our mountaineering boots to hike around in the foot deep powder.

Should have worn snow pants too. . .but I digress.

I kind of felt sad to think that we were going to cut down a perfectly good tree, especially at a time like now when a large percentage of our National Forest pines have been obliterated by the Pine Beetles in the last few years.  But, the beetle kill is part of the natural process, making way for a cleaner forest and hardier trees.





We passed several trees that were great, but none that really caught our attention until we came upon a lone 10+ foot pine with a few scraggly branches and more than one point on the top.

We took a few celebratory photos and proceeded to chop it down.

Together with the tree tied to a rope we trekked out of the snow and back to the truck, simultaneously working of the previous days turkey dinner. . . .

What a beautiful day - and a fun thing to do with my new husband!  I will post photos of the decorations later.