Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree

Got the tree finished tonight, after two nights of it being belighted but not bedecked with ornaments. (Be-ornamented?) It looks good, if I do say so. Harrison helped…some…and we hung almost every ornament we had on it, which we don’t normally do, so it’s really full. I like that.

We’ve not had a real tree in a long, long time. I think the last time we had one, in fact, was around ‘94 or ‘95—one of our first Christmases together. We bought an artificial tree pretty early in and have used it without fail every year. Each year, we’d talk about how crappy it was starting to look with its needles falling out and just how fake it looked. We always stuck with it, though, I guess because it was just easier and cheaper. Besides, you can leave a fake tree up for much longer than you can a real one. Much longer. We once had an Easter Tree because of our inaction.

But this year, Harrison asked if we could get a real tree and who am I to tell the boy ‘no’ about that? I was not prepared for how much it smells—I’m really liking that aspect of it!

It is spiny as all get-out, which I found out tonight as I was hanging ornaments. When I was washing my hands later, I felt these little pinpricks of fire on the fronts of my fingers. My first thought was that I had a rash on my hands and to wonder how in the blue blazes I had gotten that. I quickly realized, though, that I simply have a million tiny cuts on the fronts of my hands. Nice.

I was also unprepared for how flimsy some of the branches are. After years of using a fake tree, I was used to being able to place the ornament on the limb and kind of bend it upwards to hold it in place. Oddly, our real tree doesn’t do that so well. :) As we have lots of heavy resin cast ornaments—we were in the Disney Ornament of the Month club for several years and amassed quite a few of them—I had to begin to think more strategically. Heavy ornaments went towards the top, as the shorter branches could hold them without bowing down under the weight. Smaller ornaments and the paper and salt dough things the boy has made in school over the years went lower.

Overall, though, I’m really enjoying the real tree experience. Watering it everyday is kind of a hassle, but it’s only for a few weeks so I guess there’s worse that I could have to do. The kids love it, so in the end all the inconveniences are worth it.