Hey all, well the holidays are over and we had a wonderful time. We started by initiating a new Smith family tradition of cutting down our own Christmas tree, I was personally pushing for the get dad a new titanium bike tradition, but what are you gonna do! Drea , Abby and I headed out to the Jemez (pronounced hey-mez for my east coasters) to get a permit and find a tree suitable for the place of honor reserved in the den, no easy task.






The area is beautiful as you can see, Drea is quite a photographer as it turns out. It must have been listening to Darren and I drone on and on about it.





Here we are setting off on our quest for the perfect tree, all the while we were out, I had visions of myself as Chevy Chase in a Christmas vacation. If only!



Nice one of me no? As you can tell we were a bit premature in getting Abby in the backpack, and in true form she put up with it amazingly well, even though it pushed her arms up almost over her head. Anyhoo...we finally found a tree that we all liked. The really funny thing is that just as in Christmas vacation, the thing barely fit in our living room. It looked so much smaller in the great outdoors. If you turned sideways you could just get from the living room to the dinning without knocking off all the ornaments.



Here is our family photo with our proud new tree.For all those in New York, the white stuff behind us is snow, you may have fond memories of it from childhood.



Here is one from Xmas morning, more coming soon. Sadly there are only pictures of Abby getting presents, even though Drea and I did manage a couple ourselves.