For many years, we picked out a beautiful noble fir every year for Christmas. At first, when it was just me and my wife, we went to the local lot. Then with the kids we made more of a day out of it and went to a tree farm and picked a perfect tree to cut down and take back to the house. We bundled up in heavy coats and scarfs and gloves and drove away on our adventure. Everybody took their turn trying to saw down the tree and when they were all done trying, I finished it off and carted it to the car to try to figure some way to tie it down to the roof of the Oldsmobile. Every year. We brought it home and decorated it and our home smelled evergreenie for a month or so.

It was nice.

One year, my oldest son mentioned that it was sad that we were cutting down a tree every year. His teacher said we should buy a fake tree that we could use every year. As I consider myself an environmentalist and wanted to push sustainability in our house, we bought a fake tree. We went down to Ye Ole Fake Christmas Tree store, and picked out the best fake tree that they had. It was Fake-tastic! While having most of the characteristics of our nice noble firs, it wasn’t quite the same. We then proceeded to bring it out and decorated it every year for many years.

It was nice.

So, then one year, my oldest son said it was kind of sad we didn’t have a real tree.  “We should get a live tree that we could have inside and then plant outside to help the environment and to ‘Remind us of our Christmas together.” He was obviously sucking up to his Mom with that line. So, my wife found a local nursery that carried live Christmas trees and ordered one for me to pick up. The guy at the nursery suggested that we pick it up in a truck as it would be hard to get into a SUV or car. That should have been a clue.

So, a buddy of mine with a truck meets me at the nursery and we proceed to put this live tree with a 400-pound root ball into the back of his pick-up. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life.  If you thought that a tree, with a burlap covered root ball, would provide numerous places to grab onto, you would be wrong. And it was pouring down rain adding a pound to the root ball about every 30 seconds we worked on it. When we got it home, I wrapped the root ball in a couple of garbage bags and put it in a large tub before we brought it into the house. We got everything set up and it looked great!

It was nice.

The next morning the hard wood floor had a huge puddle and a permanent water stain on it. After many different tries to fix the leaking problem, the real tree ended up outside and our fake tree took it’s normal corner in the living room for yet another year.

Well as my oldest son is not around this Christmas to come up with a new idea, this year we have the ole fake tree up inside and his nice living fir tree planted outside “To remind us of our Christmas together.” But this year we received a beautiful evergreen wreath from good friends of ours and the smell in our house reminds me of our old noble fir trees from many years ago.

Which is nice.

(Reposted from 12/25/2013)