Christmas Tree Hunting In California!

We have a family tradition that we like to go up to the Santa Cruz mountains and cut down our Christmas tree every year. Our other family tradition is that we wait until the week before Christmas to do it, by then it's pretty slim pickin's! This year we went to the same tree lot that we like to go to and set off to find the needle in the haystack, that one perfect tree! Trees have gone up in price over the years and we have watched the prices grow along with the trees. Now a Douglas Fir is $50.00 and a Noble Fir is $75.00 (we never get the Noble Fir)!



Nathan and I were curious how much they would charge for this one!





The one thing that changed this year, much to Randy's relief, was that Nathan and Brayden are now old enough to cut down the tree and haul it up the hill...so Randy let them!! (Can you see the smile on Randy's face??)




Don't you love Brayden's goofy look. He did this on purpose!






Brayden is practicing posing so he had me take this picture!


It turned out to be a beautiful day and we had a wonderful time!

Our Little Angel

Ryland got to play the angel Gabriel this year in the Primary's Christmas Program. He was very good and took everything very seriously during the telling of the Christmas story. Afterwards, I think all the attention went to his head and he started performing "Saturday Night Fever" dance routines during the closing song of Silent Night. I was not paying attention to him so it wasn't until later when everyone was coming up to me and describing how entertaining Ryland was dancing on the stage that I realized what had happened. When I confronted him about it he re-enacted it for me. I am now glad that I didn't see him during the closing song. I would have been turning shades of red. We have since had a discussion about what is appropriate behavior during a closing song and what isn't. Despite all the John Travolta moves I think he made a good angel!