Your Royal Blogstress: Choice Cut

Each year right after Thanksgiving, my mother and step-father drive up to Snicker's Gap to a Christmas tree farm to cut down a fresh tree for their house. This is serious business to my mom. We had a real tree every year growing up, a freshly cut one, with our own hands at that.

With the birth of my first child, I was strongly pressured to get a REAL tree. Surely, the Infant Nicholas would be scarred for life if I didn't.

I saw it as one more thing to clean and look after, and with a baby, no thanks, I didn't want anything more to do around the house.

This was not satisfactory to my mother. A fake tree, Good Lord, Aimee, you're letting things slide. I was scoffed and glared at, scolded. I break out in a sweat just thinking about it. The next year, I cracked under the pressure. My poor boy, his childhood marred by our fake tree.

The truth is my father had given me and my husband a fake tree for our apartment a year or two before Nick was born. I secretly love it. LOVE IT. It is the perfect size. It's symmetrical. It doesn't need to be watered. It doesn't shed its needles or get spiders. It came with its own lights!

But yeah, I cracked. And I'm glad I did. It was a great experience. The year I broke down, we went on my birthday (November 26) and it was unseasonably hot, 70 some odd degrees. My sister and Maya came along too and the kids had a great time. We ran around the trees which create lovely mazes. We picked out the perfect tree and Nick got to "help" Poppy cut it down, we dragged it down the hill to be "jiggled" (I don't know the proper term, but it is placed on a machine that shakes it wildly to get all of the excess needles and debris off), then it gets fed through another machine that wraps it up neatly to be strapped to your car and taken home (the kids loved watching the machines). There is free hot cider for the kids to sip while you wait for the tree to be prepared and while you pay. Then a tractor takes you and your tree back to the parking lot- whoa! Very cool by Nick's standards.

Here are a few of my favorite pictures from that day (Nicholas and Amaya were 2):

This is one of my favorite photos. He reminds me of a little archer.
But no, it is not a bow, but rather (and don't judge) a saw.

Nick and Maya sipping cider afterwards.

Fast forward to this year. Again we have an infant, but my mom understood that we were along for the ride only. Fake tree again for us with a baby. It was chillier than it was two years back, but it was still very fun.

I was a little concerned about how the trip started out because as soon as we got out of the car Nick was asking me to carry him. He was tired and had had night terrors the past two nights, and was coming down with a cold (poor guy). But he rallied very quickly, taking off into the "maze" of trees.