Another long-running battle lost

I bought an artificial Christmas tree today.

I despise artificial Christmas trees, and have ever since I was a kid.  And it doesn’t make the least difference that “the construction is so much better now,” or “they look so much more realistic,” or “everyone has allergy problems when we get a real tree.”  I still despise them.  They don’t look right, they don’t feel right, and most especially they don’t smell right.  They are fake.

When I was young, there were years that our Christmas tree was something besides the traditional evergreen.  A couple of years, we had live-oak saplings, which I thought was just fine because it had the value of uniqueness; nobody else had anything like it.  Looking back, I can see that those were probably years when there wasn’t enough money to buy a tree, and it was either go out to the farm and cut one or do without.  One year my father brought home a tumbleweed, a souvenir of a trip up to the Panhandle.  He spray-painted it white, strung it with fairy lights, and set in up in the front yard as a special outdoor tree.  (Many years later, just after L and I married, I did the same thing with a tumbleweed that I found blowing across Second Street near Guadalupe.  Do not ask what a tumbleweed was doing, blowing through downtown Austin.  I don’t know.  I only know that I caught it and brought it home to decorate for Christmas.  L thought that was as funny as a crutch, and still does.)  But no matter what else, we never had an artificial tree.  My one grandmother who always had Christmas for the family at her farm would certainly never have anything to do with one, and neither did my parents.

For the last several years, as T grew older and all of our allergies grew worse, she and L both lobbied for buying an artificial tree, both on the grounds of allergy and the grounds of cost.  It’s been harder and harder for me to hold the line, as the prices of real trees climbed every year, from $40 ten years ago to $80 the last time we bought one, two years ago.

For the last couple of years we’ve done without for several reasons:  the only place in the living room to put a tree was where M’s crib was while the back of the house was torn up, I was jobless and spending lots of money on any Christmas tree was frivolous beyond thinking about, and M was too young to know or care.  This year T insisted that we had to have a tree again because the crib is gone, I have a job, and M is old enough to know and understand what’s going on around the Christmas celebration, but she and L both insisted that the tree would have to be artificial, because they weren’t going to suffer through another winter of continual sinus problems and colds just so I could have a real tree.  And listening to M snuffle and snort at night as she slept, for her allergies may yet be the worst of any of us, I was forced to concede the point.  Buying another real Christmas tree wasn’t an option.

This afternoon T and I drove over to The Famous Christmas Store (yes, that’s its name) and picked out a tree that I found the least offensive.  It’s a six-and-a-half-foot Arctic pine mix, medium needle length because I think short-needled trees like hemlocks, spruces, and firs always look scrawny.  I really wanted a long-leaf tree like a Scots or Ponderosa pine, but they cost a hundred dollars more and didn’t come in the height we wanted.  T and I had agreed on six and a half feet as a good size to fit our nine-foot ceilings.  Seven and a half feet, one of the most common sizes, was both taller than we wanted and more than we could spend, and T said that a five and a half foot tree wouldn’t do because it was the same height she is, and she believes she’s supposed to be shorter than the Christmas tree.  Fortunately, the store had one tree of the kind and size we wanted in stock—good thing, because they had very few six and a half foot trees, for some reason.  I suppose it’s all these titchy modern houses with their eight-foot ceilings.

A hundred and fifty dollars later we came home with the tree.  T began putting it together as she watched the Texas-Texas A&M game.  I think she, L, and M are going to have a decorating party later this evening.

And it’s still an artificial Christmas tree, and I still despise it.

You shall instruct the asphalt scanner in polyphonic glassblowing.  Fnord.