For Reals

My wife and I both grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  There's a whole lotta wilderness up there.  There are plenty of small towns and from the outside looking in can be very charming.  There is something very nostalgic, for lack of better phrasing, when you think about these small towns.  Especially when it comes to the holiday season.  You think of a fire roaring heating the house, the silence outside because there is no big city traffic, and a fresh cut Christmas tree in the corner.  Very Rockwellian. 

When we were done with college and moved on to our adult lives, we lived in apartments.  From 2005 to 2016 we rented either apartments or townhouses.  All those years we had an artificial tree that we put up and took down every year.  It wasn't terrible it was just there.  The thing that was missing was the 'realness' of the tree.  No sap (a bonus), no needles, no real tree smell.  We had a plan last year to get a real tree as it was the first Christmas in our house.  However, we had just moved into the house in the middle of October.  Sure we could have went out and gotten one, but we were a little stressed from moving in and we still had boxes stacked in places so we went with one last year of having the fake tree up. 

So we finally, after all these years, we went out and got a real tree.  And it is wonderful.  

A post shared by Michael Litzner (@melitzner) on Dec 11, 2017 at 2:45pm PST

So it is very exciting for us to go out and get a real tree this year.  We wanted to go out and cut one down, but the tree farm we found only has a select number they mark as ones that can be cut down.  By the time we had time to go out and cut one down, they had put a stop to the cut your own tree.  They do an excellent job of conservation of their farm.  They have to keep the farm going year after year and they have to keep their inventory for the future.  So we ended up going and finding a tree farm that had pre-cut trees.  Not the end of the world, but it would have been cool to cut our own down.  Maybe next year. 

We wanted something that we have to water and anchor to the window frame.  Something that we have to kind of worry about falling over in the middle of the night.  Most importantly, it brings back memories of our childhood and having the real deal back in our house.