by Chris Dixon

Created on: February 17, 2010   Last Updated: February 18, 2010

Last Christmas was the best Christmas I ever celebrated. It was also the first Christmas that we ever went to a tree farm. The experience of cutting down ourselves was quite moving. The holiday started on a more nostalgic note than usual. The whole experience was so much more enjoyable. It made a longstanding tradition even more memorable.

Picking out a tree the day after Thanksgiving has been a tradition since we started our family. It is a mixture of the way my husband and I were both raised. When I was a child my family always put up our artificial tree the day after Thanksgiving. My husband on the other hand NEVER had a fake tree growing up and swore his kids never would either. It was unthinkable! Well I wasn't sold instantly on the idea having grown up with only fake trees, I had a few misconceptions about the real ones. I thought plastic trees were the environmentally friendly choice, when there is nothing farther from the truth. Plastics release chemicals that are not good for the environment and fake trees take up space in landfills. I also thought trees clean air, so cutting them down is bad. But, tree farms plant hundreds of trees each year to clean the air and the life cycle repeats itself over and over again. Also, there are recycle programs all over this great nation where you can drop off your dead Christmas tree and they will turn it into mulch!

So ever since our first Christmas together and my first real tree, we have gone out the day after Thanksgiving and picked out a tree together. It's a loved tradition in our home. But, the yearly tradition of getting my husband to go out shopping for a tree on the day after Thanksgiving has gotten more tedious as black friday has gotten more treacherous. So the tree farm was just the change we needed. It has really added something special to our family tradition. We headed out that afternoon with a plan. We drove out to the beautiful Texas countryside and to a little farm called mainstay farms. The kids played atop bales of hay while we waited for the tractor to pick us up for our hayride. We drove around through the fields of different trees until we saw some that we liked. Then we hopped out and walked around for some time with a handsaw through the trees until we found the perfect family tree! Or at least one we could all agree on. Which in and of itself is no small task! Then, we each took a turn with the saw and cut it down as

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