Faking It This Christmas

During our first holiday together as a couple, Mr. P and I lamented how unfair it was we never had real Christmas trees growing up.

When we rented our first apartment together, we picked out our first live tree from a local lot. It was glorious. It was big, it smelled good, and I didn’t even mind the thousands of pine needles that wove themselves into our carpet and poked their little green heads out to say hello through the end of Easter.

When we moved into our first house, we agreed it was time to go bigger. We bought an enormous Douglas fir and were so proud to be kicking off a lifetime of down-home, good-time holiday memories in our new home.

Until...

“The tree stand’s too small,” screeched Mr. P.

Those five little words signaled our downfall. I hightailed it to Ted Drewes to pick up a bigger tree stand, but having not measured Douglas, I realized I had no idea what to get so naturally I grabbed the biggest one they had. Because in my mind, Douglas was that enormous. Like Rockefeller Center Christmas tree enormous.

One semester of high school physics should have taught us you can’t stand a Dum Dums stick upright in a bathtub, but with Mr. P’s engineering background and my years of MacGyver watching, that tree stand was going to work. We were newlyweds on a limited budget - there was no leeway for a multitude of tree stands. We’re not Beyoncé and Jay-Z, dammit.

So with some bungee cords, furniture propping and a whole lot of swearing, Douglas stood tall and proud and shiny in our dining room, though a little lopsided. Mr. P and I drank some hot cocoa and marveled at our Christmas engineering prowess. It was so damn perfect Norman Rockwell would s***.

Then at two in the morning, we nearly s*** ourselves.

At two in the morning, Douglas hit the floor with a thunderous bang, in a cloud of lights and ornaments. Handcrafted, hand-me-down ornaments from our childhood, passed down from generation to generation, now shattered in a million pieces along with 10 billion pine needles. For the next two hours, Mr. P and I shifted between mopping up gallons of sticky tree water that were pillaging our hardwood floors, grounding our naked soles into broken bits of Hallmark Santas, and holding up Douglas while rigging up a makeshift foundation.

Have you ever held a seven-foot pine tree for two hours? It’s the equivalent of cuddling a 100-pound rabid feral cat that’s never heard of a manicure.

Finally, by 4 a.m., we lost it on each other. I blubbered like a baby over the scratches and sap crisscrossing my face and arms, but mostly over the fact this imbecile tree was ruining our first Christmas in our first home.

Mr. P fell apart in a more dramatic style. Accompanied by a stream of monumental cursing that made the nativity scene Baby Jesus cover his teeny tiny ears, Mr. P hoisted Douglas out the door and threw him out in the backyard, ornaments, lights and all, where our friend began his descent into decomposition before we could get a more appropriate sized tree stand two days later.

The day after Christmas, we got a fake tree at Home Depot for $20.

I hate it. It leaves just as many needles all on my floor as a real tree. It doesn’t give me the warm holiday fuzzies since it’s the Made in China variety. It requires the hefty splashing of Pine-Sol just to set a little ambiance. But by golly, it hasn’t caused a marital rift in its eight years in our house.

So, I ask you – please pick up a live tree so that I can live vicariously through you. And next year, it's a real tree for me.

By Nicole Plegge, Lifestyle Blogger for SmartParenting