Thanksgiving Day: relaxation, peace, comfort… not in the Reine family though; every year we reluctantly trek out to the boonies to chop down a tree. This “tradition” is less than relaxing, fills me with anger, and, even worse, makes me quite uncomfortable.

We could have just bought a cheap tree from Cub Foods only a few blocks away (the logical option), but logical doesn’t always make the Reine family vocabulary. In this case, it was the ”family experience” of an hour long drive and good old manual labor that was important…well to my mom at least.

I basically had the place memorized; I actually started to recognize specific trees after circling the tree farm multiple times. We thought if we drove around long enough the perfect tree might throw itself in front of our car. It was then we decided that after two and a half hours of circling the same tree farm, this was as good a time as any to settle for a random tree.

We chopped down the measly tree. But how would we carry it back to the entrance of the farm? Improvising, we balanced our tree on top of the car to drive it back. This worked until we hit a hill. Our already-frail tree toppled 7 feet to the ground and slid. There went half of the needles and a few branches. But no one even cared at this point, we just dragged the tree the rest of the way.

We purposely blocked the tree out of our memory and left it in the driveway. But after a few days, we started to feel bad for it. We stared expressionless at the pathetic tree in our home; or better put, we stared through the branch-less tree. This bundle of a few awkward and spastically protruding branches will sit in our living room for the next month and a half, reminding us of the torturous experience finding it had been.