Our tree is up... Must be Christmas Time!

Okay... Before you bash me for the pre-lit, artificial tree let me say that until we moved to North Carolina we never considered having one... However, the only real tree I'll have is the Nobel fir... Think Charlie Brown tree - See picture of the boys up there standing in front of the one we had Christmas 1999 - SO perfect! But, you cannot get the Nobel fir here! Nope, none, nada, nix, never and not even for all the money in the world can you buy a Nobel fir in North Carolina. And, I've tried!

It's either the Douglas fir or the white pine (think Cousin It wearing a long haired cat!) or the pride of North Carolina, the Fraser Fir, which they'll tell you is like the Nobel fir, except it's not! The branches all point to the sky so they don't lay flat like they do on the Nobel fir - this means that none of my German glass ornaments hang right and my clip-on mushrooms won't work at all! And, it can't be Christmas without my German mushrooms on the tree!

So after enduring the painful process of going out to pick out the perfect tree I knew could never be perfect one too many times, we broke down two years ago and bought the nicest artificial tree we could find - and that was no picnic either!

But fear not, the house isn't without the smell of fresh pine at Christmas because we do put up a real tree in the den - It's small and stands on the window seat, between our two Nativity sets. It's a Fraser fir, of course. But it's his tree, not mine... And it'll be this way until the Nobel Fir comes to North Carolina or I move back to California, where you can find the most beautiful Nobel Fir Christmas trees on earth!