Simple, I thought. I had the day off and we figured it would be a great day to load up the family and get ourselves a real Christmas tree. Except for a few years, we've driven a few towns north and picked out a nice tree from a seller out of Montana. We've gotten shorter trees from them, extremely tall trees from them, full trees and not-so-full trees. We skipped last year getting our tree from them, so we weren't even sure they were still there. We were happy to realize as we turned off the main road and rounded a corner that indeed, the tree lot was open.
That excitement lasted long enough for us to park the van, climb out, and set foot on the lot. And after we spotted the price on the first tree we saw...poof, excitement gone.
When did real Christmas trees get so gosh darn expensive?
One of the reasons we liked getting trees from this particular lot was the price. They were cheaper than many of the places, and we could usually get a taller tree at a good price. Something happened in the past twenty-three months. Trees got expensive, and by expensive, I'm talking double the price.
We had a budget and we considered just a couple of trees that were a few dollars over that budget. Of course, we could have picked up a beautiful 3' tree, perfectly shaped. It would have looked great on top of a table. We decided to look somewhere else. We tried two other places and neither had what we were looking for.
A few years back, we found a nice tree at our local grocery store. Sure, it's not a tree from a tree lot, but it came at a good price. It turned out to be a pretty good tree. On the way home from tree shopping this afternoon we stopped by the grocery store, found a really nice tree, bought it, threw it on top of the van and headed home.
I don't know what we're going to do for a tree next year. If prices go up in the next couple of years as they have in the past two, we may break down and buy, "a great big, shiny, aluminum Christmas tree."
But, for this year, we got us a real one.
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