Christmas Tree Cutting

After such a long, stressful and super busy semester (which officially ended yesterday, YEAH!), we were finally able to escape and cut our Christmas tree with Kevin's parents and sister. Of course I felt the need to document the entire morning on film and so now have many pictures to share with you! :) The nicest part is that we are lucky enough to live so close to Galena forest, and headed up Mt. Rose HWY for a few miles to Timberline Dr. where we off-roaded a bit (on balding tires- not good, but still managed not to get stuck, thanks to Kevin's truck driving skills). We found a good place to park, and hiked in to find our trees- here is a picture of the path we made through some very powdery snow.



It was so beautiful with the sun filtering through the trees, catching sparse patches of crystalline iridescence. Here's a close up of some dried grass poking through the snow flakes.



Here's Kevin shouting for the boys (and Pirate) to come check out the tree he found-



The trek back to the truck with the trees:



It was pretty cold- low 30s I'd guess, and proof that is how powdery the show was- it would barely stay together to make a snowball. I had Alice do a demonstration to show just how much snow can resemble dandelion fluff~





And The Boys with Papa, and the tree safely in the back of the truck:



Pirate wants in the picture too!



And here we have Sean eating snow: typical little 5-year-old!



And Ashton as well:



A fun day- just nice to be outside in the fresh air with family (and not working on the ever-ongoing stream of papers I seemed to have this semester)! I feel like I can finally start concentrating on Christmas instead of walking around preoccupied and trying to think of 8 things at the same time...