U-Cut, U-Haul, U-Think Twice Before Doing This Again

This weekend Mr. and Mrs. Seattlest drove out to North Bend to cut a Christmas tree down and haul it back to Seattle. No, we didn't hike up Si with an ax and harvest a sapling, although that does sound fun. There's a tree farm out there by the name of Crown Tree Farm. It was our first time getting a tree from anywhere other than those road-side dealies or the enclosures that pop up in big parking lots this time of year, or so we thought until we got on the phone with Dad in Illinois afterwards. "You don't remember when you and I and your brother went to cut down a Christmas tree?" he said. "So much for making childhood memories." We thought this was a Pacific Northwest thing, but apparently you can cut down your own Christmas tree even in the Midwest.

Of course, we knew that a u-cut operation would fall somewhere between a hike in the woods and the big-box retailer's parking lot, but somehow we got the impression that it would be nearer to the hike. Not so. It's just like shopping for the tree in a parking lot, except there's a little more mud and you have to spend a few minutes sawing the the thing down. We got a little map telling us where the Douglas Firs were and how to find the Noble Firs, but almost all of the little plots were clearly visible from where we parked. No chance of getting lost and little to no chance of finding much besides a Noble Fir, map or no, and all the trees had tags on the indicating species and price, all just like the parking lot. It's cheaper and fresher, of course, and at least this way we can be reasonably sure some other asshole didn't hike up Si to fell our tree, but the whole thing--adhering strictly to the holiday spirit--turned out to be kind of a pain in the ass that didn't end after we hauled our bush the twenty yards to the baling station. Inexplicably, we left the car rack and tie downs in Seattle, so after an aborted attempt to fix our tree to the roof with nylon rope we treated it like a whacked mafioso and stuffed it in the trunk for the ride back down 90. Does smell great in the living room, though.