Oh Christmas Tree
There are certain brand loyalties that people hold onto ferociously. These are those pop culture markers that define identities: Coke vs Pepsi, Cloth vs Disposable, Real vs Fake.
I’m old enough to remember when fake trees first made a splash on the Christmas scene. They were alternately embraced or reviled, seen as either a brilliant invention or a sure sign that Christmas was going to hell in a handbasket. To this day, people remain divided by their love of the fresh cut pine or their love of the convenience of plastic. When my mother brought home our first fake tree, no one was more appalled than I. Where was the pine smell? The needles that pricked you mercilessly as you attempted to hang tinsel on the tree and seemed to infest the entire house, jumping out at you from unexpected locations in the middle of August? The inevitable baldspot? A fake tree was most definitely not Christmassy.
But…it sure was convenient. Especially those newfangled prelit ones. And if there’s one thing I hate more than being the assembler of the some assembly required items, it’s stringing lights on the Christmas tree. Last year, when the top strand of lights on our handmedown tree blew a fuse, I could have gone in, untangled the whole mess, and restrung the tree with working lights, but I didn’t. We just had an unevenly lit tree.
This year, for the first time ever, I bought a new Christmas tree. I could have gone with a real one, but the prospect of wrestling a firehazard up to the eighth floor, combined with the idea of then stringing lights around those stinging branches, didn’t exactly fill me with the same holiday spirit as the 50% off all prelit trees sale at WalMart. So, I bought a new tree.
To bring home and decorate with pretty glass balls and candy canes and jingle bells in a house with a toddler and a kitten. I don’t know what I was thinking then, but after stepping on the 97th jingle bell last night, I’m thinking that they’re the fake tree equivalent of the pine needles. But, so long as I don’t have to string any lights, I’m cool with that.