Describe the process your family used to get a Christmas tree when you were a child...

This is another of those loooonnnnggg time ideas I've had that have taken a while to commence. Several (more than a few, you see) years ago, a friend gave me a mason jar filled with strips of paper. Each one had a question or prompt on it. The instructions say:

Write your personal history the easy way--answer one question a week, and in a year, you will have a (fairly) complete history. And, be honest--remember--this is for posterity.

So, I'm going to be writing about these prompts every week--if not more often. I'll use the prompt as the title to each blog entry, and you are more than welcome to borrow the ideas for your own history.

To today's topic--Christmas trees........

When I was a kid, we spent every Christmas in Fairfield with Nannie and Papa. They lived on a farm and relatives gathered there to celebrate the season. Sometimes when we arrived, Papa already had a tree up in the living room, but a few times we were early enough that we got to go with him to pick one out. Now, Texas is not known for it's lush fir trees; in fact, the only evergreens we had available were cedar trees. So, that's what we used. I actually never knew any other kind of Christmas tree existed until I was an adult. And hey, when you cover them with silver icicles and lights and treasured family ornaments, they look amazingly good. Of course, cedar trees do induce terrible allergic reactions in sensitive people, but they smell good and we just kept plenty of tissues on hand. 

Since cedar trees grow all along the ditches and roadsides in that part of the state, we would drive along the back country roads, looking for just the right tree. It had to be the perfect size and shape. Eventually, we made our selection and Papa cut it down. Then we dragged it to the truck and wrestled it into the back. All the way home, we talked about decorating it and all the presents that would be stuffed underneath. 

For some reason, a cedar tree always seems to have a "bad" side, so we would have to position it in the corner of the living room just so, to hide the less lush spots. It sometimes listed a bit to the side as well, so Papa or one of the uncles would wrap a bit of string around the trunk and nail it to the wall for stability and better aesthetics. But we didn't care. We flung icicles all over it, decked it with strings of old-fashioned, multicolored, big-bulb lights, hung the ornaments and rejoiced over its beauty. No expensive fir tree could ever have looked any better to us.