Christmas Tree 2008

When we were living back east, we had started a semi-tradition of going out and cutting down our own Christmas tree each year.   It's usually a little cheaper, you know you're getting a fresh tree, and it's a fun thing to do with the family.  Last year we bought ours pre-cut at the tree lot around the corner, in part because we weren't going to be around for Christmas.   This year we decided to give cut-your-own another try, although we weren't sure if there was a place to do so given how un-Christmasy it can feel around here, what with the palm trees and all.

It turns out that the area is actually awash in tree farms.  There's a small mountain range to the south of us, near Los Gatos, which seems to be filled with tree farms of one sort or another.  After doing some hunting online, we decided on Four Winds Christmas Trees, mostly because they had a web page with useful information on it, and also because it seemed pretty straightforward to get there.



You may not have known this, but it seems that Megan has a small phobia of going uphill in the car.  I'm not sure why this didn't manifest itself when we lived on our seemingly vertical street in Tuckahoe, but we've definitely seen it out here.  She'll complain even if we go up a highway overpass.  This is relevant because the Four Winds Christmas Trees turns out to be one of the highest tree farms in the area, around 2400' according to the topographic map.  Megan was screaming her head off as we made our way up a number of switchbacks, passing several tree farms at lower elevations.  We had reached a point where we decided to go back to one of them, but the road was too narrow to turn around.  Finally, we made it to the farm, sanity roughly intact.  A nice lady at the entrance gave the kids candy canes, which made things a little better.

The tree farm itself was nice.  It's perched on the hillside, and has kind of a wild feel to it.  They give you a bow saw, ask you to cut above the lowest level of branches (so it will grow back), and away you go.  One particularly nice part was that any tree you cut is just $45, no matter how large, which removed a lot of the usual cost dithering we would normally do.  After wandering around for about a half hour we found a nice nine foot tree, cut it down, and put it on the car.  As we were going out, we passed a bunch of families in the parking lot that were having picnics -- it seems a lot of people around here have extended tree-cutting traditions.



Oddly enough, Megan had a great time going down the mountain. She was yelling 'Wheee!' and telling us how fun it was. Go figure. We got home and set up the tree that afternoon. We even had to go out and get more lights because the tree was so big.