x mas tree shopping

Chicago wins this one hands down.  Which is kinda weird, right?  Chicago is a big city surrounded by a lake and suburbs.  Aspen is a small town in the mountains surround by pine trees and yet........


In Chicago I had my X mas tree guy.  They brought in fresh trees from Wisconsin twice a week.  They gave me a couple of shots of whiskey.  They gave my kids candy.  They gave the tree a fresh cut, netted it tight and mounted it on my car or offered to deliver to my house (all in the same price).  Oh yea and that price was 10-12 bucks a foot depending on how drunk the dad was. 

End of the day I would walk out with a super fresh 9 foot tree, (5 feet wide at base) for $100 bucks and a little buzz.  Wooooo Hooooo. 

I've found 5 options around Aspen:

Clarks market in Aspen---7 foot tree for $385 bucks --yea you read that right a bit more than $50 a foot and the tree looked like it might have starred in Charlie Brown's Christmas.

Whole Foods in Basalt ---50 bucks for a 6-8 foot tree.  Trees were cut down before Thanksgiving, you can get a fresh cut but not netted tight for drive 20 miles home, and the trees looked like crap.

City Market in Basalt --$85 for a wrapped up 7-8 foot tree cut around Thanksgiving.  No fresh cut.  No way to open tree up and see how it looked.  Needles falling from tree when touched.

Eagle Nursery in Basalt-- $15-20 a foot.  Pretty good looking trees but also cut around Thanksgiving and brought in from.........Minnesota?  Yes fresh cut, no on netting tree to ease transport.  This is what we went with --more than I wanted to spend but the trees and City Market and Whole foods just looked horrible and wouldn't be able to hold half our ornaments (unhappy wife --bad way to start Christmas season).  The tree is not that fresh---post cut it is not gobbling up water.

Option 5 is interesting if you can handle it---for $10 you can get a permit to cut your own tree in designated areas of the national forest.  Assuming you have the means to cut the tree and transport it this is obviously the best and maybe even better than Chicago.  But what Chicago transplant owns a chain saw?  Not this one.

Happy start to the crazy season.