On Monday night Steph and I heard on the news that there was a place that was giving away free Christmas trees. We got the address and after a little driving around on Tuesday morning, we found the lot! (Our first attempt got us to the office of the sponsoring company, which is in the same strip mall as a large store called Joe's Gun Shop. Not what we had in mind.) We figured the trees would be dead and scraggly, but hey, free trees. We were wrong and we got a beautiful 7 and a half foot Douglas Fir! The guys at the place even cut off the end, bundled it up, and tied it to the roof of the car!


So on Tuesday night we put up the tree. Here is the view from the living room toward the kitchen of just the trunk. (The highest point in the house is about 15 high and we wanted the tree to fill up the space so we put it on the trunk.)


Here is the tree all bundled up in netting.


And here it is all decorated on the ground. Lifting it up onto the trunk took all three of us, and we had only one small casualty.



And here it is on the trunk!


After we put it up I thought it looked a little bare, so I made a bunch of ornaments out of the shells we collected in October after the hurricane. I hot-glued ribbon onto the shells and got a few dozen free ornaments!