After last year’s Texas Christmas tree experience we decided to do what real Texans do…we went to the store and bought our tree. In the Northwest I never, ever would have thought about doing that. We’ve always cut down our own trees, sometimes with permits for the North Cascades, but usually from a local tree farm. It wasn’t unusual for us to have 2 or more trees on the top of the car and one in the back. We’d spend hours looking at tree after tree analyzing its finer qualities and debating about which was the best tree in all the land. This year was a little different. This year we pulled up to Costco, payed our $40 and got a tree from the back of a refrigerated semi-truck trailer. It was the fastest, least traumatic tree finding experience I can remember.
I’m not sure if this is something all Costco stores do or if this is just a thing they do in states like Texas with a tree deficit, but the trees had yet to arrive by 2pm (when I was there to get gas) and by 5:30pm (when we got our tree) the truck was a third or more empty already. So if you want to be like us and get yourself a Costco tree you’d better hurry.
It is also the first time in my adult life that I can remember having a tree all wrapped up. I’d always scoffed at paying the extra money to wrap it in plastic. They always fit on the car just fine. We had no idea what it was going to look like. They offered to open it up for us, but we decided we’d risk it. We needed some sort of adventure out of the whole experience. And after all it is Costco. If we opened it and it was terrible they’d take it back. And as it turns out it is a nice looking tree. Not very big (7ft, noble), but Wesley thinks it is huge so that is all that count.
Here is a time lapse video I made of pictures Amber took of the unraveling of the tree. You can see the kids are excited.
As always, great dialogue and pictures!
Love the chef pics and tree time lapse. No judgement from us on the pre-cut tree – we’ve done it the last two years in Yuma!