Welcome to day 4 of this year’s Christmas countdown on the blog!

If you’re stopping in for the first time, you can get caught up by starting back on day 1 to understand this year’s theme, otherwise…

After stops in Holland, Paris and Belgium… today’s special Christmas memory is very Canadian!

Collecting the Tree

These days, Christmas involves digging the artificial tree out of the box in the garage and setting it up, typically, during the first week of December.

For many of the earlier years in our family though… it was much different. We would go either to a Christmas tree farm or to the forest (80% of my home province is covered in forests) to choose and cut down our tree.

As you can see, it sometimes also involved trimming the top so that it would fit in the room.

Artificial trees first came into our life the year that Timo was born.

If you know anything about natural trees, you’ll know that they always lose some needles during the weeks that they remain indoors, and it’s not uncommon to find some of those needles around the house as late as June or July – always a slight sore spot for Liz.

So on a Sunday afternoon, I lingered long at church while she was home with our 7-week-old. Seeing a great deal on an artificial tree I thought, “Aha! Solve the ‘needles-in-June’ dilemma, become a hero!” and I bought the tree.

Upon arriving back home, we stood it up in front of the door, rang the doorbell and yelled “SURPRISE!” when she opened it up.

The look of mild disappointment was evident. It turns out that, despite her protestations, she quite loved the family tradition of wandering through the snow in search of a lovely tree to bring home.

She’s gotten used to it though and, here in France, is glad that we need only bring the box down from the loft in the garage. We’ll be doing just that later this week…

Tomorrow… come with us to McKee’s Mills!

Thank you sharing this memory and…