The Rivir Ranch: Our 2011 Christmas Tree

With our hectic schedule in December we didn't have time to take a trip out to the Christmas tree farm so we had to settle for an already cut Christmas tree. I've been telling Carl how I thought we should get a really big tree about 9-10 feet tall since we a 22 ft ceiling in the living room. He wasn't really into my idea and thought we should just a get normal sized 7 ft tree. So...we stopped at Menards to see what kind of trees they had left and they just had a few 4ft trees, those definitely wouldn't work for us. Next we went to Lowes to check out their trees. Again, they had a very small selection and none of them were very big. So we went over to the grocery store where they were selling a bunch of Christmas trees in the parking lot. A local community group was running the tree sales but no one was out there to collect the money so Carl went inside the store to check on the prices of the trees. The lady in the store says all the trees are $35. Carl comes bursting out of the store to tell me all the trees are $35, get the biggest one they have. This is awesome! I picked out the biggest tree of the bunch, a 10ft tree. We paid for our tree and loaded it up, it wouldn't even fit in the bed of the truck without hanging out several feet.

We got home with our huge tree and Carl cut the end of trunk off so that it would suck up some water.

Then he drilled a hole in it and stuff it with cotton. Apparently, this is to help it suck up more water further up into the tree.

Then Carl hauled our tree into the house.

Luckily we had a tree stand that would hold such a large tree but it took a little while to get it set up so that it wouldn't coming crashing down.

Since the tree had been outside and bundled up, I had to fluff it up a little.

Then we started to put on the lights and ornaments. I stood on the ladder and Carl stood on the stairs. We passed the lights around the tree to get them up at the top of the tree.