Maybe I'm romanticizing it, but I think Christmas tree farming would be the cat's meow.

Oh sure I know it's a lot of hard, backbreaking work, but every time I walk in the fields of a Christmas tree farm it just feels so peaceful. Best way to drain the stress.I try to snap myself back to reality by reminding myself that you have to plant rows and rows of saplings each spring.Then there's the spraying for bugs (wouldn't want any creepy crawlier coming out among the ornaments) and pruning and shaping thousands of trees in the heat of the summer sun, but I say, "Bring it on! Give me some hedge trimmers!"This is all to my husband's chagrin. Having grown up on a farm and worked summers on a farm, the last thing he wants to do is return to the farm.No, that nice, climate-controlled cubicle is his happy place.For me, some of my best memories involve going to a Christmas tree farm to pick out a tree.One of my favorites was with my older brother and sister. The ground was covered in snow. Everything was white. We picked out a tree, and my siblings stuffed it inside my brother's van.Looking back, I don't know why they didn't strap it down to the roof, but I was just a kid. It seemed perfectly normal to me.All I know was it was a blast sitting on the hump of a console between the two front seats as we rode home (that was before children had to be strapped into car seats until they are in middle school).The whole way home, we sang Christmas carols to the radio, and the tree bounced along like it was dancing to the music. I didn't realize it was just a bumpy road.With my own children, we had some great times tramping through the snow looking for that "perfect tree."One time, my two youngest sons got tired of my wandering among the trees and instead gathered evergreen branches off the ground and built a hut. Then they crawled inside it. Picture worthy!Eventually we found the "perfect tree" (not too tall, not too squat, not too round, not too twiggy, and doesn't have a big gap on one side that you have to hide in the corner), we chopped it down, and left the hut for the deer.We're lucky to have several Christmas tree farms in the area to wander about on each Christmas season. If you didn't go out to one yet, give it a try.You might just make some memories of your own.