My my my. How the years do fly by. I can't believe this is our 11th trip to hunt the mighty Christmas tree. It would have been the 12th if I had not wimped out when Emma was an infant.
So last year was such a perfect year for Christmas because Thanksgiving was the absolute earliest in November it could possibly be. We were able to go to Bear Lake the weekend after Thanksgiving and it was still November when we left. It was so awesome. This year was the opposite. Thanksgiving was as late as it could possibly be - the 28th. No later date is possible for the 4th Thursday in November. That had us leaving for the trip on the 6th of December. No good! Too late! We begged Mary to go either the weekend before Thanksgiving or the weekend of. She very gamely agreed to go the weekend of Thanksgiving. In fact, her kids all wanted to leave after Thanksgiving dinner but since I wasn't even serving pie until 5:30 that night, plus we wanted to have our movie-fest with the Preslar cousins! So we took off Friday morning. Normally we drive in the dark, on a Friday after work. What a pleasure to drive to Bear Lake in the light. I'm so not a fan of driving Logan Canyon in the dark. It's very twisty.
This year I felt like we got some extra blessings - my kids were a little scarred from last year's total lack of power. I was dreading a powerless weekend myself. I'm not as tough as my husband. I just like light at night. And heat. And the ability to wash dishes in warm water. But we were determined to go, no matter the status of the power. I had two very reluctant children who were on the brink of asking to stay home. We thought about letting Chase stay home - his best buddy always has a birthday party the weekend that we are away, and he really did not want to miss it one more time. We got two lovely blessings. One - the cabin had a new generator and we had power with no troubles all weekend long. We felt so spoiled. Movies! Light! Washing! Showering! YESSSS!!!! Also...Chase's friend had to reschedule his birthday party. I know his friend was bummed - there was an issue with the weather. I felt bad for Ethan but...yay that Chase got to go to the party the following weekend after all! I felt very happy for these little mercies.
Here was another thing I really enjoyed. Our friends who have facilitated this trip every year have three kids, just like we do. Their oldest is Romney's age and their youngest is Emma's age. Normally their oldest child tends to be more interested in Chase than in Romney but somehow this year Romney and their daughter just clicked. They paired off and talked and talked and just had a ball. Emma paired off with their middle daughter - they hit the Polly Pocket collection pretty hard. And their youngest kind of tagged along with everyone here and there. It was a great weekend!
So the tree hunt itself was slightly on the rushed side ....we normally spent all the time we want up the tree-canyon itself because there are few to no other people there. We carefully choose the tree and let the kids play in the snow and take a lot of pictures. However, we were totally shocked this year. Luckily we were the first group up the canyon and we pulled over into the clearing. Soon there was an absolute parade of people - pick up trucks, four wheelers, SUVs...and right off the bat the first pick up trucks got stuck. Yikes. I could feel an absolute nightmare coming on. So here's what we did - we tossed the kids off into the snow with the command to go play. Troy started helping the stuck pickups. I ran to the trees and started frantically searching for a tree. I could tell that if we didn't leave soon we would be trapped by all the stuck vehicles. I'm happy to say that we found a great tree within 10 minutes. It was the quickest tree hunt EVER. We snagged our tree (which we loved but was not the best looking tree we've ever chosen), snagged our kids, and zoomed out of there. We may have taken a couple of pictures but mostly we hurried back to the cabin and enjoyed warm showers, hot soup and alone time because we kind of abandoned our other friends up there. Just kidding. They wanted to stay and look longer. We were happy with the tree we found and were even happier to not be stuck behind literally a dozen other vehicles.
Besides watching some great movies (and horrible Hallmark ones...turns out I not a Hallmark Christmas Movie fan), Mary pulled out a puzzle and Chase got sucked in for hours. The triumph of finishing
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