1-3-11 Time to Say Goodbye

There is such a wonderful build up to Christmas from the day after Halloween to Christmas day.  I am one of those people who loves every bit of it.  Not the commercial side of it but the visual side of it.  I love the colors, glitter, textures, decorations and the lights.  I am a visual person and the season to me is stimulating.  This year we went to pick out our Christmas tree the weekend of Thanksgiving.  We do it that weekend so our college age daughter can join in on the decorating of the tree while she is home for the Thanksgiving holiday.  This year when we arrived at the tree lot  the trees were frozen so we were unable to look over the shape of the trees.  My husband went over to a random tree, stood it up to check the height and that it was straight.  That was it, that was the tree.  We paid for it and took it home to thaw and decorate.   Out of the many trees over the years this was by far the best and most beautiful tree we have ever had.  We loved this Christmas tree.  Today, by myself, I had to take down the tree.  My image today is a little bit of our tree as it stands in a mound of snow right outside my back door where it received a little blanket of snow this afternoon. 

Technically, this picture is kinda cool because I just took this image a short bit ago in the dark.  I have been experimenting with long exposure night shots so I set the camera on the tripod and set the shutter for 5 seconds to get a nice exposure.