Riding With The Top Down

The Great Christmas Tree War


I grew up in a Christmas House. You know the kind – my mother took down every single decorative item in the public areas of the house, including the bathrooms, and replaced them with something red, green, or sparkly. There were lights and animated reindeer outside, wreaths in the windows, cross-stitched cloths over every table. There were candles surrounded by plastic wreaths on the coffee table, snowglobes and crocheted angels on the end tables, and a light-up Christmas scene with rolls of cotton batting for fake snow that took up the entire pool table. And a tree, of course, as tall as the room could handle, with a motley collection of ornaments that had been gifted over the years, or that our teachers forced my brother and me – who are both hopelessly inartistic – to fashioned out of green-painted salt dough or popsicle sticks and glitter.

It was, always, a real tree, so the moment I stepped in the door after school I smelled pine and remembered Christmas was coming.

My husband, however . . . well, okay, I can give him some slack here. He grew up without Christmas, and as such doesn’t have proper appreciation for the importance of some things. He does really adore Christmas, mostly because he likes food and presents an almost embarrassing amount. And unlike me and the rest of my generation, he could be shamed into eating lutefisk with my grandfather on Christmas Eve, which earned him major Christmas points.

But he doesn’t get the real tree thing. Messy, he says. Expensive, and simply too much work. Why not make it simple?

I’m not interested in fake, I say. About anything, really. Real flowers, real chocolate, real butter, real diamonds . . . why would you ever settle for anything else?

It came to a head when our older boys were, oh, maybe 5 and 8. He wasn’t putting one up, he said, unless it was fake. I’d rather have no tree at all than one that wasn’t real, I insisted.

Days went by. Weeks. He was sure I’d cave, that I couldn’t survive a Christmas without a tree. I, otoh – well, if one starts simply giving into husbands, that way madness lies.

So we had no tree that year. Not as terrible as it sounds, because we opened our presents at my parents’, where there was a lovely – and real – Christmas tree.

We’ve had a tree every year since. A real one, of course. Though now the yearly conversation goes like this. DH: I’m getting a little one this year. A really little one. Me: Fine. Husband: I mean it. A SHORT tree. Me: Got it. No problem.

But then he takes one of our children along, and, out in that empty baseball field turned Optimists’ Tree Lot, they all look so small and lonely in all that space, and he invariably hauls home one that’s sticking out from our van roof in both the front AND the back by a good three feet.

Except this year. THIS year, he insists, we’re getting a small tree.

Seems we’re giving away presents this month . . . my favorite thing! Win a couple of my other favorite things (food, and books!) by telling me your Christmas “musts,” and what you’re willing to give up in the name of sanity. (I’ve given up baking Christmas cookies, though I enjoy it very much. But no one I know really wants to EAT more than a few, which leaves far too many in my kitchen, tempting me all day).

Susie