Charlotte and I ventured out to get this year's Christmas tree.  After a little bit of coaxing to get into the car (Charlotte hates riding in the car!), we drove 2-3 blocks to the place where we've gotten the tree the past several years.

The people who sell the trees are a bunch of Polish people from Greenpoint.  The location is a vacant, abandoned gas station most of the year, until they take it over around Thanksgiving.  This year someone started developing the lot, so now they're stuck in an alley next to it.

As soon as we arrived Charlotte was given a pair of reindeer antlers, and then she immediately ran to the tallest tree in the lot -- easily 13 feet tall! -- and said she wanted that one :-).

Fortunately, she wasn't too keen on the tall tree, particularly after I pointed out that besides not fitting in our home, even with her on my shoulders we wouldn't be able to put a star on top!

It was pretty difficult to choose a tree, however, since almost all of the trees were bundled up (as you can see in the background of the Charlotte photo).

This is the case with pretty much any tree place in the city (that I've seen), and it's really annoying since you can see the tree at all!

The gent who manned the place showed us a tree that was actually quite nice, Charlotte loved it and and I was not in the mood to push him to cut open a bunch of other trees to compare with.  So we took it!

The tree is about 7.5' tall, and almost 5 feet wide -- really tall and fat.  After the guy helped us get it in the car, Charlotte and I drove it home!

The girls were besides themselves with joy on having a tree -- for evidence, just see the video below, which I managed to capture purely by chance.