It's Christmas! Day 2: Christmas Tree Farm

It’s Christmas! is a 25 day blog and vlog segment that I’ll be doing this December to bring you crafts, reviews, and ideas to make your Christmas season even more fun this year (especially, with this pandemic thing we’re all trying to navigate).

Hopefully, my family can inspire yours to not let this crazy year ruin the holiday season for you.

Disclaimer: Technically, we did this before December. But there’s still plenty of time to find a Christmas tree farm somewhere near you.

This year, we decided to visit Hardy’s Reindeer Ranch. This is actually the 3rd year we’ve been here. We usually go on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, but we decided to go on Black Friday this year. I’m not sure if that was a good idea or not, but there’s pluses and minuses to both days.

When we showed up, it was pretty busy! We couldn’t turn around and go home though because it takes us about an hour to get there. So, we wore our masks (which I’d say only about 50% of people did), and did our best to stay away from everyone else. We bought our tickets for the reindeer tour as soon as we got there. They cost $6 per person and include 2 cookies to feed to the reindeer. We fed them, pet them, and even got reindeer kisses from them. It was a little crowded, but we did our best to just stay in the corner to avoid the rest of the people. When we have visited on Sunday in the past, it wasn’t nearly this busy.

After we were done visiting the reindeer, we walked out to the tree farm and looked to see if there was a tree we wanted to cut down. I had a couple requirements: must be 6 to 7 feet tall, can’t be too prickly (we made that mistake last year), and it had to look pretty (obviously). We were able to find our perfect tree, so we went to work cutting it down. Once it was cut, we wheeled it to the front where they shook the tree to get any loose needles out, cut off some of the lower branches, and wrapped it up for us. My husband went to the store to pay for our tree, then we stuck it in our car to be transported home.

Before we left, we popped into the Cafe to get a cookie and some hot cocoa for my son (for $4). He said they were delicious.

Overall, it definitely wasn’t a cheap experience: about $90-$95 for us. However, it was so much fun. We spent about an hour here, created great memories, and came home with a beautiful live tree to decorate.

So get out there, and pick out a beautiful tree for your family.

And as always, from my family to yours, Merry Christmas!