Last weekend, we drove about 1 1/2 hours each way when it was very cold and snowy to cut down our tree in Pike National Forest in the Buffalo Creek area of Colorado. We had a friend with us who was visiting us from Florida and he had not seen snow for over 10 years. We moved here from Virginia not too long ago and had always cut down our Christmas tree at a tree farm in Virginia, but it was our first year of cutting down a tree from the Colorado forest. We hiked and hiked and there it was - the perfect tree on a hill standing all by itself. What attracted us to this tree was its size and natural beauty. We have a 17 foot ceiling in our family room and we wanted a tree that would almost touch the ceiling. This tree was perfectly shaped with a straight trunk and a nice straight branch at the top - the perfect place for our treetop ornament. We measured the tree before loading it on top of the SUV (good thing we had our friend from Florida- we needed all the help possible to load it on the car). It measured 16'7" tall!
Once we arrived at home the tree presented a few challenges. For starters, it was so wide it did not fit inside the front door. So we had to take the tree in through the sliding glass door. Then when it was time to decorate the tree, the ladder we had was only 15' tall. So Dad moved all the furniture in the family room to one side, put a piece of wood under the tree stand and pushed the tree all the way to the side of the room where we could reach over the second floor balcony and decorate the top third of the tree. Then he pushed it back to the center of the room to decorate the rest of the tree.
Our tree is a Douglas fir. There are 700 lights on the tree. The theme for our tree is "Star of Wonder". Our treetop star is a spiny starfish which we found on the shore in Sanibel Island, Florida, and painted it gold. The tree has lots of stars in many different colors, and shapes, purchased from different places we have visited. There are also ornaments our children have made through the years, and family ornaments. Like the star on the top, there is a story behind every ornament on the tree. We adorned the tree with snow on the tips of the branches so it would look like we saw it in the forest before we cut it down. The tree has so much natural beauty and we wanted to showcase the wide branches, straight trunk, and natural layers so we chose ornaments and lights that would be accents but not overpower it. The tree is like a star to us - huge, filling up most of the family room, brightening up our home, reminding us daily of all the wonder of the season.
The adventure of cutting down our special tree in a Colorado forest was a memorable day! We have started a special family tradition we hope to continue for many years to come.
