Umpteen years of getting Christmas trees at IKEA. I’m a serious scrooge when it comes to box stores combined with the month of December [thank you online shopping]. I think at some point one of the kids mentioned this fall that we should cut our own tree from the forest. It was a done deal before they’d finished their sentence.

The ‘usual’ week is the first week of December. It’s as early as we dare push collecting an IKEA tree for fear of having no needles left by the 25th. But I figured a freshly cut live tree would fare better [correct, by far], so we headed out November 30th. We could have gone Dec 1, but Dec 1 wouldn’t have been during deer season.

The family had a lovely time [kind of] debating which tree was perfect, and we had lunch in our now very frozen bush camp that they’d only seen in pictures. After a memorable day out, fingers got cold, kids got tired and cranky, and homeward we went, having seen zero game but with a trailer full of ‘not-IKEA’ Christmas tree decor.

As we left the bush, we drove through the last mile or two of crown land, in literally the final hour of hunting season. On the road stood a whitetail doe. It left the road into the woods. I followed the deer.

Top that, IKEA.

Whitetail fawn harvested on Christmas Tree outing