Real trees make for merrier Christmases

We put up our Christmas tree this past weekend.
Actually, I should say we assembled it, as it’s a fake tree my mother gave to me a number of years ago after she got a better fake tree.
Our fake tree stands about six feet tall, and it’s one that comes in dozens of pieces that look nearly identical to each other, but if any of them are put in the wrong slot on the fake-tree pole, the fake tree doesn’t look right. A fake tree that looks fake makes for a fake Christmas, so I have to make sure the fake tree doesn’t look fake, as I like my Christmas real.
Fortunately, Christmases aren’t judged by the realness of a person’s tree, because if that were the case, my Christmases for the past 20 years or so would have been pretty dismal. But even with fake trees decorating the living room during this time, the holiday has always been fun for me.
My parents got the fake tree my family and I now use when I was in high school. For years they always said they were going to get one, mainly because they didn’t want to deal with the hassles real trees come with, but for some reason they never did.
They finally took the fake-tree plunge when we moved to the city of Berlin, away from the countryside where real trees were plentiful. Before we got the fake tree, I remember going out with my father on a number of occasions, searching the woods for the perfect tree. He would grab a saw and then load my sister and me in the truck. On some occasions we found the perfect tree right away; others times we had to scour every nook and cranny of the woods to find it.
The “perfect tree” is a bit of a misstatement on my part, because the trees we found were never perfect. In fact, I usually hated them because they were thin, messy and smelly objects that didn’t look anything like the perfectly-shaped full trees in the movies and on television. Plus, I often had to water them, giving me one more chore on a list of chores I already didn’t enjoy doing.
The first year my parents put up the fake tree seemed like heaven. The tree looked good, and it required no work on my part, as my dad assembled it and took it down. I liked the fake tree throughout high school and college for these very reasons, and I didn’t realize I even missed real ones until my wife and I, before we were married, had to go find a real tree for her parents one Christmas.
We didn’t go out to the woods and cut one down like I did when I was younger, but we were able to go to a large Christmas tree farm where we cut down one after two hours of searching. I should say we cut two down, oops, because the first one we cut down didn’t appear as healthy as we thought it was after we started moving it. We were both picky and didn’t want to return with a not-so-great tree.
The tree we found seemed like the first perfect real tree I’ve ever been associated with. In reality it probably wasn’t any better than the trees we had as a kid, but the nostalgic event made it more special.
We haven’t been back to the woods or a tree farm since then, as my wife and I have used the fake tree in our own home. Neither of us has wanted to deal with needle mess they make. But this year, after assembling our fake tree, my wife said she would like to get a real tree again after we move out of our apartment and into a real home again. She thought our son, Braden, would enjoy going out and finding one.
She’s right. I did when I was younger. Braden is 3, and he was so excited after we assembled our fake tree he told all his friends at his daycare center on Monday that we have a tree. I can imagine what he would have told them had he been able to choose and cut down a real tree, and I realize it’s an experience he would never forget.