Design Crafters

How do you kick off your family’s holiday season?  Many families have an annual tradition that marks, for them, the beginning of the Christmas season.  A few weeks before Thanksgiving, my family and I start planning a trip to the local Christmas tree farm.  It’s a wonderful tradition we began before the children were even born.  It has sort of become the unofficial start to our holiday season, and a very lovely way to kick it off, too.  Hayrides, hot cocoa, baked goods, holiday greenery, Christmas carols playing in the background, and acres and acres of future Christmas trees.

Thinking back on it, I think it was that we first went to the Christmas tree farm with some friends, who had asked us to go with them.  While there, they turned to us and asked us to take some photos of their whole family, standing in front of the rows of beautiful live Christmas trees.  We obliged, snapped a few shots, and then we found “the perfect” tree for our home, so we quickly forgot taking those few family photos. But our friends didn’t forget, and a few weeks later, we opened our mailbox to find a Christmas card from them, with one of the photos we’d taken for them on the card smiling back at us.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, their Christmas card photo turned out so well that we decided we would like to “borrow” the idea for our own cards someday.  And that’s just what we did.  It’s fun to look back at our little collection of photos from the Christmas tree farm that we’ve amassed now; each and every one of them was taken for that year’s Christmas card. Now it wouldn’t feel like the holiday season if we didn’t begin it at the Christmas tree farm.