Our Charlie Brown Christmas Tree

We wanted our first Christmas tree as a married couple to be a special one. And special it is.

After church, we went out and bought a $10 "cut down your own tree" permit from REI and headed North in search of mountains and snow, which we thought to be the perfect backdrop for procuring our first Christmas tree.

Two hours of singing along to Christmas songs on the radio later, we had arrived at Stevens Pass. We chose an obscure trail and drove precariously with my front-wheel drive compact SUV up the path as the amount of snowfall steadily increased.

After only one near-death incident with turning our truck around, we found it! Not just any tree, but THE tree!

We pulled over, grabbed the hacksaw from the trunk, and began feverishly sawing away at the trunk of our glorious tree. (Well, Dan sawed and I took pictures and caught snowflakes on my tongue.)

After an exhaustive amount of sawing (our borrowed hacksaw wasn't at the top of its class), I yelled "Timber!" and the tree finally came crashing down to much applause and cheering (mine and Dan's).

We trimmed it down to a more manageable height (again, Dan sawed while I took more photos), dragged it along to the truck, hoisted it up onto the roof rack, and tied it down tight! We were officially the cutest Christmas couple ever with our tree atop the car.

We made a pit stop to sit in Dan's cousins' hot tub and down some hot chocolate on the way back. Second stop: Target! We bought our tree stand and ornament hooks. We were off to a great start!

When it came time to trim the tree officially and bring it inside, we used only the most modern methods of technology. I had Dan lay down next to the tree and raise his arm above his head so that we could make sure the tree wouldn't be too tall to fit inside. (It worked. Don't knock it 'til you try it.)

Then came the moment we'd been waiting for. We stood back and observed our tree....its snow had now melted. Its branches had dropped. It was....well, it looked just like the tree in Charlie Brown's Christmas movie.

Appropriately, we put the Charlie Brown Christmas DVD in the TV while we hung lights and carefully placed our ornaments, both new and old. We wrapped a blanket around its base as only Linus would do.

Our tree rocks!