Every year right after the Thanksgiving holiday Jeff and I head out in search of the perfect Christmas tree.   It’s become a wonderful tradition now that we live in New England.

It’s just not that easy finding Christmas trees in Florida, unless they look like Palm trees and not the kind you can chop down yourself!

Our adventure begins with the initiation of a large cup of a warm and inviting – frothy, double caramel lattes.  Enough to keep us warm from old man winter and doused with an adequate amount of sugar to supply us with enough energy to run through endless fields of trees.

We make our way over to Van Wilgens Garden Center where the festivities all begin.  Do we want a Blue Spruce, a Frasier Fir or the reliable Douglas-Fir?  We grab our saw and off we go.  Noses lead the way… onto the most fragrant tree of all, which is, for us the bushy Douglas-Fir, but seriously… these trees looked more like the Fat Albert Spruce. Honestly, for real – that is the name of a real pine fir tree!

The search begins…

There at the end, I think I see it…

Yes, it’s perfect, absolutely gorgeous, we found the perfect Christmas tree!

Jeff the lumberjack cutting down our Christmas tree.

Timber!!!

So the nice people at Van Wilgens Garden Center helped load our tree onto the tractor and tow it back to our car where they kindly hoisted it upon our roof, tied it snugly down for the ride home.

With our Christmas tree placed in her new home, I make plenty of hot coco with a crazy amount of vanilla fudge chunk ice cream floating to the rim of our cups – another round of sugar for tree trimming.

Here we were… all sugared up, unwrapping delicate ornaments and untangling miles of colorful lights to adorn our tree, then we christened with an angel at the top.

I think the tree is b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l!

And here’s the mistletoe where Jeff and I… shared our Christmas list.