Do you fake it?

The Christmas tree that is, don’t know what the rest of you were thinking.

I grew up with a fake Christmas tree and didn’t know any different. Caroline grew up with real trees and didn’t know any different. So of course at that point where our lives amalgamated decisions had to be made.

Do we have a real tree or a fake tree?

I conceded and so we’ve had real trees for the last 15 years. There have been good trees and bad trees but overall they’ve been alright. Some get a little spindly and all of them forever drop crap all over the floor. Of course, from Caroline’s perspective they all smell nice too. From my perspective, I inevitably end up with stick sap on my hands (which happens to shit me).

The other beef I have with the real tree is that at the end of the process you have to dispose of them rather than just pack them back into their box for next year. And because we’re so good at keeping things neat and tidy that usually means that we have the tree a lot longer than we need to. I mean one year in Canada, when the snow melted, I found the remains of the bloody Christmas tree on the lawn!

At least in Canada we were surrounded by snow and the trees lasted longer. Hell, you could even wander off into the forest and cut down your own (though even that proved to be very hit and miss).

You can well imagine how I reacted just now when Caroline called to tell me that they’d been out to buy a tree and got home to discover that it was more like a poorly groomed broomstick. I can see that we’ll have two trees this year (or at least have paid for them) and yet once again, neither of them will be a repeatable, good every year, fake tree.