Ever since my wife and I got married, some twenty odd years ago, we’ve bought a real tree for Christmas. There is just something special about a real tree that beats a fake one every time. To me, real trees look better, they smell better, and I even like the way the pine needles fall onto the floor.
There is a tree farm about twenty miles west of our little town, and we go there every year. It is one of those places that has multiple plots of land. Each year they allow tree hunters to go into one section, choose their tree, and cut it down. Then when the season is done, they plant new trees in that section and allow them to grow for a couple of seasons. Then the next season the next section is cut down, and so forth.
Once you choose your tree, they give you a little tag, and you can go shop for ornaments or whatever while the workers cut the tree, put it into a little shaking machine to free any loose needles; then they shoot it through a netting machine and place it in the line for you to pick up. We then take our tag, pull the car around, and they tie it to the roof.
The way they are supposed to tie it is they open our doors, run the twine through the car’s interior, then over the tree, and tie it all down. The guy must have been distracted when he tied ours. I stopped off at a QuickTrip to get a drink and a snack and quickly realized I was trapped inside the car. The guy had looped the string through my window instead of opening the door, and thus the string had essentially locked me in!
The wife got my drink, and then when we got home, she cut me loose.
When I was a kid, my father owned a copy of the John Denver and the Muppets album A Christmas Together. We would play it over and over again around the Christmas holidays. It features fun versions of Christmas classics like “Little Saint Nick” and the “12 Days of Christmas” (with Miss Piggy adding a zealous “ba-dum, bum, bum” to her Five Gold Rings segment). Plus an assortment of Denver-led ballads. His version of “Silent Night” where he sings it in the original German and explains the origins of the song, tears me up every time.
Anyway, I now own that album on CD, and it is always the album we play while we’re putting up our Christmas tree. We don’t have a lot of traditions in our family, but that is one of my favorites. Stringing lights up and putting ornaments on the tree while The Muppets sing silly songs and John Denver makes me cry always brings in the spirit of the season for me.
themidnightcafe.org 
I can not believe my family and I are not the only ones who have the John Denver and the Muppets Christmas album every year when we decorate our tree!! Holiday greetings from The Netherlands! Von.
That’s awesome. It is a lovely tradition and a great album.
Glad you have your tree Mat, i love anything with The Muppets in. At least the original show back in the 70’s etc, the films that they made are brilliant, i’m not a child, but if they are on TV, they will be watched!