o, tannenbaum.

there’s a tree farm back home that we discovered a few years ago – i can’t at all remember the name of it (so strange – in the months that we’ve been here i’ve started to forget so many little details of home. sad.) but we absolutely loved it. i love looking at the pictures from those tree-chopping adventures. starting as a family of 3, then 4. bitty in the baby bjorn (not much has changed, i suppose, as she made wen carry her the whole time this year as well. if only they made baby bjorns for 3-year-olds!).

anyway, last year we didn’t get our act together to figure out the christmas-tree-farm scoop, so at the last minute wen bought one off the street and lugged it a few blocks home. we chalked it up to our new city life, but i did feel as though a certain element of the season was missing.

so this year we were determined to not let that happen. which is how we found ourselves driving down a beautiful country road, on our way to a beautiful christmas tree farm, with some beautiful new friends. * more on that to come.

it turns out christmas tree farms in germany are strikingly similar to christmas tree farms back home! (i’m not sure what i was expecting … there’s not too many ways you can interpret trees and saws). we stumbled our way through the german instructions (again, very similar! just swap “dollars per foot” to “euro per meter”) and off we went!

the morning felt like a piece of home – and not just because of the activity itself, but because we shared it with some fun new friends. friends who are also from oregon. friends who also have 2 daughters. friends who also love the lord. friends who … lived literally TWO MINUTES from us back home, but that we didn’t meet until a few months ago. amaze.balls. isn’t the world so beautifully small? i love it.

we laughed and walked and shivered (it was snowy and gorgeous, but freezing) and each family chopped down imperfect but otherwise perfect trees. and we ended the adventure with sausage sandwiches and a fire pit to warm up (SCORE for germany! i don’t recall EVER being offered a sausage sandwich at a tree farm back home).

shortly after we drove away with our perfectly imperfect tree strapped to our car, i received the best text … that was exactly what i had imagined for our christmas tree hunting experience! god is good. 

indeed.