Today we were supposed to go to the Christmas Tree Farm to pick up a live pine, as is our custom over Thanksgiving weekend. When the children woke me up at 6.45 (what is so strange about that? Tell me…what???) they were bouncing around and excited about our visit to the farm.

We did get a christmas tree today, but we didn’t make the 45 minute drive to Christmas Tree Farm. What changed our minds? Was it the price of gas?

No, not the price of gas.

We were, purely and simply, too tired to drive out into the country, take a bumpy hay ride to the tree plantation, wander about choosing a tree, get bitten by fire ants while cutting it down, bundle the children onto a line of hitched-together carts disguised as a train, and then listen to them whine all the way home about how hungry they were, until we felt obliged to run through the drive-thru at McDonalds.

So we went to the local garden centre and in 5 minutes had chosen and paid for a much better tree than we would have found at the farm. For the same price. Another 5 minutes and the nice man had tied it to the roof of my car without even hanging around for a tip. The strangest thing? The kids never once asked for the farm. As long as they got their tree, they didn’t care.

There must be a lesson in that, somewhere.