This is Charlotte’s Christmas tree. Last year, the three of us decided that buying a real Christmas tree every year was pointless and wasteful — you lay out a big wad of cash for a tree that sits in your house for three weeks or so, makes a huge mess, creates an insane fire hazard, and then throw it away. It’s such a symbol of Thoughtless America that I can’t even begin to joke about it. I had to lobby a little bit to get the wimmins to come around to my thinking, but in the end it was a genuine consensus. So we spent a somewhat frustrating Saturday afternoon last December shopping for artificial trees.
Along the way, we bumped into the reality that buying one of the really good, natural-looking trees was considerably more expensive than we were able to spend on that particular weekend. The discount retailers of this country, however, had already thought of that and have fake Christmas trees at almost every price point. However, as the price goes down, so does the aesthetic quality, and it seemed like every one we looked at presented something objectionable to one of us.
Now, it’s important to remember that I, personally, do not like Christmas in the first place, and would just as soon not have anything to do with it at all, but I have had to STFU and go along with everybody else for the sake of domestic harmony. So I went into the experience with a willingness to go as low-end as possible, and even made suggestions about how we might conceive of an alternative Christmas tree that was more in keeping with our iconoclastic approach. As we kept bumping into these unhappy truths about the desirability of cheap-ass fake trees, eventually the Wife And Child began to warm up to these entreaties as well, and we wound up at the closest Wal-Mart. There we found this white tree, as fake as fake can be, complete with already-strung lights. It was the floor demo and the only one left, so we paid maybe a whopping $30. In addition to its inestimable and literal white-trash charm, it had the advantage of disassembling easily into three parts that fold up and fit in a large storage box, so the likelihood of causing a quarrel when it was time to set it up was greatly minimized. Most importantly, Charlotte thought it looked cool, and her satisfaction outweighed whatever remaining resistance Bridget had.
Once we got it home, put together, and decorated, it actually looked very festive. And it really does fit our little family’s somewhat off-kilter approach to the Horrible Holiday better than some dying piece of shrubbery ripped from its roots and left to desiccate and die. Because so many people around here begin decorating for Christmas sometime in mid-August, Charlotte had been pestering about setting up the tree even before Thanksgiving, but we try to adhere to the “No Christmas Stuff Before December 1″ rule. This past weekend it was finally within that parameter, so I hauled the box out of the basement and we put it together and decorated in about half an hour. It looks just as good as it did last year, though we added some extra lights and a star this year.
This morning I came across this Treehugger.com post about a lady in Scotland who has been using the same little artificial Christmas tree for 82 years. Here’s a picture of her with it:
I don’t know if Charlotte will hang on to her Wal-Mart clearance special for the rest of her life or not. My family had an artificial Christmas tree that we used every year from the time I was just about Charlotte’s age until just a few years ago. Not every tradition has to be traditional, after all.
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