Christmas Traditions - buying a Christmas tree

I love this time of year!  I love that we get to celebrate the birth of our Saviour! There are so many beautiful things to look at this time of year!  Beautiful Christmas trees, wreaths, advent calendars, lights, and many more decorations!  2 weeks ago Sunday, the Holyde's and I went to go get our Christmas tree (we went right after church, so hubs was cleaning up the church and didn't come with us).  We walked a short distance from the church where we found a market (by market, I mean like convenience store) that had a couple of trees outside the shop.  The first place we looked at had trees for a ridiculously priced amount and we thought it was way too much to pay for a tree.  This place was more reasonable, but what we have noticed since picking up our tree is that it had probably been chopped down quite some time before we got it even thought the worked said that they had been freshly chopped down that day... kinda funny!  Anyway, we picked up our tree and because there wasn't any room on the bus, PT walked home with the tree while the rest of us girls rode the bus.  As we were on our way home, I was laughing in my head thinking about all the times that I can remember picking out a tree and this was by far the strangest place I have ever gotten a tree from!  When I was much younger, my family and I would go to tree farms around the city I grew up in a chop one down.  When I moved to SLO, I would purchase them pre-cut from one of those temporary tree farms set up in the car park.  One year, I even got one from Rite Aid.  The year before we moved here, we were living in a small studio and there really wasn't room for one so a lady from church let me borrow her the Grinch Who Stole Christmas looking one.  It was fake and pink!  Perfect for me!!! Not sure that hubs loved it that much, but he allowed it :)  Last year, the weekend of Thanksgiving, we picked one out from one of the home base stores here which reminded me a lot of the one year that I got one from Home Depot.  Same idea!  The challenging thing about buying a tree here is the fact that we take public transportation.  The tree we had last year was quite big and it was super funny taking it on the bus and then the walk down the hill from the bus stop to our house.  All this to say, we are breaking our old Christmas Traditions and making new ones!  I love it!  I love that things are not the same every year and that buying things like trees in the city is such a funny experience.  But, it's all part of the complete experience!  I would't change it!  Instead, you have to embrace it and laugh about it!  The greatest part was bringing it home and decorating it with my London family!  What a hodgepodge of tree ornaments we have!  I didn't have very many, but you can most definitely tell which ones are mine, which one is hubs, and then whose the rest of them are.  It's cute!  It's like the blending of our families, all on one tree.

Do you have any Christmas tree traditions?  When do you get your tree and decorate it?  What kind of decorations do you put on your tree?

~Trista