The No-Snow, No-Tree Blues

So, apparently I caught Kate Anderson's depression bug and now I'm feeling down in the dumps. We had a really terrific Thanksgiving...lots of family, lots of food...good times. But today I'm dragging. We enjoy being in Alabama, especially with all of my family around, but we still miss Laramie...the friends, the town, and the snow. This is the first "day-after-Thanksgiving" spent in AL since Steve and I met. We spent our first Thanksgiving together as an engaged couple and we flew to Minnesota to be with Steve's brother. Our other Thanksgiving breaks were all spent in Wyoming. So we really associate Thanksgiving with snow and going to get a Christmas tree. We have the best memories of driving up to the Snowies with Steve's family to find the perfect Christmas tree. We'd have snowball fights and go sledding and get nice and freezing cold and then pull out the piping hot pot of white chicken chili. Once we were all toasty again, we'd get down to business. We'd drudge through 3 feet of snow sometimes for an hour, undoubtly falling several times, until we found it. The perfect tree. Standing tall against the other trees, sunshine pouring through its perfect ornament-hanging branches. Steve, ever the woodsman, would then pull out his saw and drop the perfect tree into a bed of fresh snow (sometimes hitting us on the way down). After bandages were applied, we would haul the perfect tree into the back of our truck, have some post-snow hot chocolate and then (the boys would) make one last batch of yellow snow before leaving the mountains. Steve and I were musing again last night how perfect our trees were the past 3 years. No crooked trunk that wouldn't fit in the tree stand, no bare spots that we had to hide. They never turned brown or dropped needles. And there was always the perfect branch on top to place the star on. We are definitely missing our perfect tree this year, since there are no real mountains around AL (just hills they call mountains), but we have high hopes that next year we will be living somewhere where we can again hunt down the elusive, but attainable perfect Christmas tree.

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