Advent

Well December first is upon us and this year we have planned a different kind of count down to Christmas. While browsing on pinterest for different advent calendar ideas I discovered Random Acts  of Christmas kindness or RACK, that others have been doing. Where every day if December they count down to Christmas by performing an different random act of good will to people around their town. That sounded like a novel idea to me and a great way to make the kids holiday a bit about what they can give rather than what they can get.

Here is our set up, each paper bag is our deed for each day of December.

Day one today we are taping chocolate snowmen on ATMs around town, along with our note explaining why there are chocolates stuck to bank machines and wishing them gods love this holiday. We have a mix of acts, some anonymous like this and others where the kids can see people appreciate their effort.

Yesterday the tree farms here opened, so we stopped in, we were just going to look and see what we could find, we have 20 foot ceilings and we wanted to maximize as much height as we could, but from the tree lots around town the biggest we saw was 8 feet so we weren't very optimistic.

But we grabbed a saw and headed down the path.

And found our tree. This farm had tons of huge trees and what surprised me was that we were in no way the only ones buying huge trees. Just while we were there we saw five others loading ginormous trees into their trucks or on top of their cars. This is our tree, 16 feet.

Mark cut it down with his bare hands, what a woodsman.

The next trick was how to get this mammoth home, since we hadn't figure do actually finding a tree we weren't prepared to actually have to transport one home, our drive in movie stuff was still in the back, our mattress and blankets and so on, but the farm owner lent us a tarp to cover our stuff and then proceeded to stuff the tree in. This is as far as it would go, considering the tree is as long as the whole truck and the bed is only 6 feet we strapped it down and went with it.