It’s the first of December already – hasn’t the year just flown! We are being very organised this year and making sure everything ‘Christmas’ is taken care of before mango season madness kicks off here at Blue Sky Produce next week – none of the last minute, slightly stressful craziness that we had last year!
So – one of our favourite things about Christmas is the Christmas Tree. We love choosing where to put it and decorating it as a family, pulling out all the old decorations made by the kids or special ones given as gifts. Since we have moved up here, we have a new rule that we must have a ‘real’ pine Christmas tree. I always had a ‘real’ tree growing up and the smell of them takes me straight back to my Christmas’s as a kid with all my cousins! We would all pile in the back of the ute and head off around the farm looking for a pine tree with a suitable branch we could chop off for a Christmas tree. We had to sing Christmas carols at the top of our voices or my Dad would stop the ute and would not move again until the singing was at a satisfactory level. It didn’t matter if we only knew the chorus of each Christmas carol, we’d just sing what we could and move on to the next one. Such great fun and great, great memories!
Yesterday, we made our first visit out to the Atherton Christmas Tree Farm, about a 45 minute drive for us (plenty of time to crank the Christmas carols in the car on the way and make the kids sing along!), to choose this year’s Christmas tree. It was easy to follow the ‘Christmas Tree’ signs out of Atherton, along the Kennedy Highway towards Ravenshoe to find the Christmas Tree farm at Upper Barron. This will be the start of what we hope will be a new tradition for our little family. The Atherton Christmas Tree Farm is only a relatively new family owned business, but they have some great plans for the future to make the farm a real ‘Christmas’ location and are trying to bring back some old style ‘Christmas’ magic!
We arrived at around lunch time which is hindsight was a bit silly seeing as this is Christmas in Australia and it is hot and very dry!
31 degrees on the car dash thermometer!
But we all threw our hats on and had a great time arguing the merits of which tree was the BEST one for the Fealy Family to take home! Here’s what our visit looked like!
Hmmmm ‘which one is best?’ says Tobes with hands on hips.
“I think this one is pretty good”, says Mum.
‘Come and look at this one!” says Jack.
Sooooo many to choose from and not a bad view!
Dad thinks this one is the winner.
I spy a little elf!
There’s a whole family of them!
Ok – this is the tree!
Time to go and tell the owner that we have choosen!
Out comes the chainsaw
It’s a bit noisy!
Load it in the little trailer.
Up the hill it goes!
Wrap it up to take home.
Load it in our trailer to take home.
Fealy Kids Christmas Tree Choosing 2014
The trees at the Atherton Christmas Tree Farm range in price from $45 to $55 and there are all sorts of sizes available! It does cost $5 extra to wrap your Christmas tree to take home but as we had a little way to travel we wanted to make sure we still had some branches on our tree when we got there! Cold drinks and some beautiful hand made Christmas wreaths are also available for sale at the farm. The farm is open from 8am – 6pm every day now until Christmas and I think the best time to visit would be in the afternoon when it is cooler! Another great idea that a family we saw doing, was to take a picnic with you to have under your Christmas tree before you take it home – just a way to add a bit more fun to the experience!
Once we got our tree home the joy of decorating began! And the smell! Our house smells so, so good at the moment! Now we just need to add some fresh, ripe mango smells to the pine tree smell and Christmas will be here!
Kipp’s first Christmas tree decorating – he was not much help!
Matt’s ‘OCD’ tendancies are very useful in our tree decorating!
Fealy Family Christmas Tree 2014 – we think it is our best one yet!
Although our real tree does add a little extra cost to the expense of Christmas (and a bit of extra mess dropping pine needles everywhere!), we love that our tree becomes part of our Christmas traditions and memory making. We hope that by spending a little less on gifts and putting it towards our tree, it will be worth it in the fun had in choosing, decorating and smelling it all month long! Also, as an extra bonus we are supporting another local, farming family!
Do you have a ‘real’ or plastic tree at your place this year? Please share your Christmas Tree stories or traditions, we’d love some ideas for what other family do!
Please Note. We did not receive our tree for free, or any discount from the Atherton Christmas Tree Farm, we just wanted to share our experience and all opinions here are our own.
Your family motto “that life is a journey, not a destination” has been very much on my mind as we take our own journey to building our next home. And this post is such a fabulous tale of your Christmas journey. Long love family traditions!!
We used to have a real Christmas tree in one home of my childhood, courtesy of a huge pine tree growing in our front yard. Dad would ‘trim’ it once a year. The smell was wonderful. And your decorations are fantastic! So many you almost can’t see the tree itself. I love that!
Thank you so much for a wonderful trip down memory lane!
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