Sharing New Holiday Traditions with Your Blended Family

Sharing is caring!

This is a sponsored post, but all opinions are my own.

 

Sharing New Holiday Traditions with Your Blended Family

Growing up, our family had a lot of a special holiday traditions. Every holiday season we looked forward to these traditions and spending time together. When I remarried, my husband came from a family that didn’t have many family holiday traditions. That’s why, in the last ten years, we’ve been sharing new holiday traditions with our blended family

You would think that having been together for almost ten years, we have all of our traditions down pat. Nope. Until recently, we had mistakenly thought that our allergies might prevent us from enjoying one of my favorite holiday traditions; a REAL Yule tree! But then, we discovered that there are many different tree varieties, and some are more suitable for people with allergies.

We were surprised and delighted to find this out, because now we can work with the National Christmas Tree Promotion board to pick our very first real Christmas tree. This isn’t just the first holiday tree for our blended family, but it’s actually the first real tree that I’ve had in my adult life. I was probably as giddy as the kids!

 

We were also super excited about getting a real Christmas tree because it’s so much better for the environment! We try to live as green as possible, and plan on composting our tree in our woods after we use it this holiday season! Did you know that Christmas trees are carbon neutral, meaning that they absorb as much carbon dioxide as they grow as they will emit when they are disposed of! Between that and the fact that the Christmas Tree Promotion Board states that it plants 1-3 trees for every tree that is cut down, we were stoked to “keep it real” this year.

We just bought our very first home in August of this year, and less than five miles from our house is a pick your own Christmas tree farm.

It was a beautiful snowy, Minnesota morning on Thanksgiving Day. We grabbed our minivan, wrapped up the teenagers and headed out to the farm!

I knew this was going to be a fun experience as soon as we saw we could borrow saws. No, I’m not a tool nut, it just meant we were really going to “pick” our own Christmas tree including sawing it down!

The pick your own Christmas tree farm was literally acres and acres of every type of holiday tree imaginable! Growing up, we usually had the really fragrant trees with the short needles. Hubby was really in love with the “fluffy” looking Yule trees. We drove around in the van, looking from tree to tree and we finally spotted the ONE!

 

 

As the kids leapt out of the still rolling vehicle, they ran to throw their arms around the tree that would be coming home with us. It was the perfect height; not too tall, not too short, the perfect shade of green to let our favorite lights shine like diamonds. And there were even little field mice scattered about a little anxious from the commotion we were making.

With the saw in hand, Bayla knelt down next to the tree, and with determination in her eye began to slice through the base of the tree. Not wanting to miss out on this “first’ in our family, Keiran and Brenden both took turns, but it was I with a big ceremonious arm of strength that finally separated the tree from it’s roots.

With all the fun had, it was now up to hubby to get the tree up on the roof of the van. As we were driving back to the front of the lot, the family decided, almost in unison, that this was DEFINITELY, going to be a new family holiday tradition for the Sears family.

Now the tree is in our downstairs living room, and the children diligently make sure it’s watered each day until Yule.  (If you have teenagers, you know how hard it is to get them to do just about anything.) Even our fur babies have had fun investigating the new tree in our life.

Holiday traditions aren’t just about doing or buying new things, they are about creating memories. Sure, this might sound cheesy, but in life it’s little things like this that you did together that your family will remember when the years start to roll by.

Even though we don’t live close to our families, we’ve been able to pay homage to them and the traditions we shared in our childhood by continuing them with our children. This year it was more than exciting to add this new tradition to our holidays.

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Christmas Tree Promotion Board.