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Shopping for a tree was kind of a drawn out experience for me. We would go to the same place every year. Well, what seemed to be the same place; a big lot with a bunch of green trees never really looked any different. It only took me ten seconds to decide what tree I wanted to get, but my parents were looking for the right height, the right fullness, and everything else that I was not interested in. For the remainder of the time, after that 10 minutes, I followed along and watched as my and my dad, and the tree man, wrapped it up, and tied it to the top of our vehicle. Once we got home my dad would take the tree outside and trim off all of the odd branches. He would cut the trunk to the right height and put it on our red tree stand to bring inside. My mom loves Christmas trees, which is the reason we always got ours so early. She loves the smell of the tree in the house and she has a fetish for decorating. We would all get together one night about two and a half weeks before Christmas to take out all of the Christmas ornaments, and decide which ones we wanted to use this year. I have two sisters and we are all two years apart from each other. I am the oldest. After we got all of the decorations out, to the tree they went. Although, they never stayed where we put them. My mom would always reposition the ornaments since we could only reach half way up the tree, which left the bottom half of the tree cluttered with ornaments. I know everyone has done this, but every few Christmases we would pop a lot of popcorn and thread them onto a long thread to wrap around the tree. You would have to let it sit over night so it would become stale to make it easier to use. What I did not understand is, why we popped so much popcorn and did not eat any of it.
I was very exciting to be riding around town and seeing everyone else's Christmas trees through their window. We would always make time to take a night to go look at all the Christmas decorations in other neighborhoods and around the city.
