A Christmas Tree Story

Megan The Dreamer, With High Expectations Christmas Tree Version (Note: this has never happened):

On a pretty December day, we tell the kids we are going to go pick out and cut our own tree at a Christmas tree farm. They excitedly gather their coats and obediently get in the van. We merrily make our way to a Christmas tree farm, where we are greeted by a hot chocolate booth. We get our hot chocolate and make our way into the trees. The boys romp with us and we pick out the perfect tree. My husband suddenly becomes a woodsman and cuts the tree down in 10 seconds. Magically, a photographer has appeared, capturing our beautiful family moments. We are all smiles and magic is in the air. It begins to flurry. Tree had, it is tied on the car and we all go home. The next few hours are pure family bliss. The boys' eyes light up as we gently pull out ornaments and decorate our perfect tree, pretty Christmas music on in the background. I make homemade popcorn. All is calm, all is bright.

End Scene.

Real Life: Christmas Trees, Years 2013 and 2014

The two years run together, as they were about the same.

It's getting late, near dusk. Tired parents put fussy boys in the van. Although I would love to go cut a tree somewhere, we have no idea how much that costs and right now it just seems like a bad idea. We've seen a few Christmas tree stands around town, so we head out. The first place we pull up does indeed have hot chocolate. We get the boys out of the van and begin to poke around. One of the tree stand workers walks up and hands me a cup of cocoa and offers to help us. We have a tight budget, but surely we can find something here, even something small. I see a price tag.

"Behn," I whisper. "These trees are $55."
"All of them?" He asks.
"Well, this small one is. The bigger ones are more."

We give each other "The Look" and each grab a kid and hustle back to the car.

"Why are we leaving?!" Graham wails. We explain that we are going to look for a tree somewhere else. The boys protest, but we wrestle them back into their carseats and drive to the next tree stand.

We are wiser now. This time when we pull up to a tree stand in a promising tree lot, only I get out. I casually look around. A grumpy tree stand worker ignores me until I meekly ask,

"Excuse me, how much are your trees?"
"They start at $70," he growls.
"Welp, see ya later." I practically gallop back to the car.

I'm feeling dejected. Behn is grumpy and the kids are losing any patience they had.

"I guess Food Lion it is," I mutter. I had seen the firs outside the store for a thrifty $30, but had balked at the coldness of the experience of buying our Christmas tree at a grocery store. We pull up next to the side of the store where trees are piled up. Behn gets out to go in an pay for one. The store is mobbed. Graham is in hysterics now.

"I want out!!!!" the boys scream. There is nothing to do but suffer through it. Behn finally comes out of the store. Because it's a busy grocery store, they don't have any workers helping tie trees to cars and they don't provide string. Behn randomly picks a tree and chucks it in the back of the van, grumbling about pine needles. At this point, we all want to go home.

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The next day, I have to get out the ornaments. Although there are many things I love about our house, the lack of storage is not one of them. We do not have a garage or a shed, so we have shoved bins of seasonal items in The Bowel of the House, otherwise known as the crawl space under the stairs. It is the perfect place to go during a tornado or to hide a body. It is a difficult place to store bins. One by one we get them out, breathing in fiberglass until we wheeze. The boys are overjoyed, jumping all around and generally getting underfoot. We haul the bins upstairs and begin getting out the ornaments.

Graham opens a bin.

"A ball! A ball, a ball!" He grabs an unimportant but fragile spherical ornament and his little fingers close in on it too hard. It breaks immediately. I yelp and run over to check his fingers for shards of glass. After this, I remove all glass or breakable ornaments, which leaves us with ornaments made from plastic, cloth or popsickle sticks. Twenty minutes of chaos later and the tree is "decorated" and I pile the semi-empty bins aside.

Over the next few weeks, ornaments fall off or are pulled off. The tree sheds needles. It serves its purpose Christmas morning, but it's so shabby that the day after Christmas I sigh and take it down. Behn hauls it out to the Christmas tree graveyard at the back of the hill in our yard and we watch it slowly decompose over the coming year.

"Next year, we are getting a fake tree," Behn says.

End scene.

2015: The Year of the Fake Tree

It is the very beginning of November, which means the world is vomiting all things Christmas at us, much in the form of flyers in the mail. I toss most of them in the recycle bin, but casually look through the one from (ironically) Christmas Tree Shop. If you've ever been to a CTS, you'll know they carry seasonal and homegoods all year, but at Christmas they have an extensive selection of cheap but possibly kitschy items made in Taiwan. The advertised fake trees catch my eye. They are on sale and there is also a coupon. $20. I show Behn later on and he practically does a jig. We make plans to go there.

On a rainy Saturday, we put the kids in the van and head to CTS. The store is an over stimulation nightmare, but the boys do pretty well. We spy the on-sale tree, grab an impossibly small and light box that apparently contains said tree, and pretty much keep the trip short.

The tiny box sits in the basement until after Thanksgiving. Yesterday, I took a deep breath, and we got it out. The nice thing about a small, cheap tree is that it takes 4 seconds to set up. Win. As Behn put it together, I laughed so I wouldn't cry. Scant is one way to describe it.

And then: it was fine. Really! We set it up and the boys were thrilled. Behn took on the job of going into the tomb crawl space to get out the ornaments. We filled in some of the gaps with some other fake greens and the boys had a blast piling on the ornaments. We talked about some of them; who had made them or where they had come from. There was indeed Christmas music. There was minimal bickering between children. Behn kept asking me if I was mad about the tree and I could honestly say, 'no.' Sure, it's small and simple, but that is ok. In fact, it's more than ok.

Because this stuff doesn't really matter too much. Christmas should not be complicated. It should not be stressful. Traditions are important, yes; but teaching the kids (and ourselves) about Advent, the coming of Light into this dark world- that is what counts. And really, what are a 4 and a 3 year old going to remember about a tree anyway? They are going to remember decorating it and getting excited and all of us being together.

It's beautiful, really.