November and December and family

In November when Marty & Mindy and kids were here, we went to Uvas to go hiking.  Uvas is a place where life suddenly slows down and everything is green and the water is crystal clear and the earthen smells are deliceous.  Charlie and I hung out while everone else was hiking.  We collected acorns and leaves and threw rocks into the creek.  So peaceful and wonderful.

Traditions are like habits, they are hard to break, so don't start a tradition unless you plan on making it a life long event.  Here we are keeping one of our traditions that make Christmas so great.  We could just go to home depot and get a tree, but where is the fun in that.  This year we had to go to a tree farm that wasn't so far up in the mountains because there was a very big wind storm that weekend and some of the roads were closed due to power lines being down.  

We met a nice family who owned this tree farm and they instructed us on where to find the trees and what kind of trees there were and they gave us a little history on the area we were in.  The tree farm use to be a little town called Patchen which had a lot of local history to it.  There were pine trees and cedar trees and redwood trees.  I got a cedar tree this year which looked very feathery, but actually it was kind of stickery. 

Here is the tree I picked

and here is Jeremy cutting it down

and here is Russ keeping an eye out for everyone.

And some hot chocolate was nice. 

here is my tree all decorated and all lit up.  I think it's magical.

here it is in the daytime.  It's still beautiful.    I wish we could keep trees in our house all year long.  They smell nice and look beautiful.