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Boomer’s Journal:

by Tom Anselm

Fake Tree or Real Tree…

That’s the Yuletide Question

   It’s less than a month before Christmas and I am a bit behind on the house décor. The lovely Jill handles the inside trimming, but it’s up to me to drape gutter and post with lights and roping. So slip and slide along the roof tiles I will go, any day now.

I’m actually feeling the need to

jazz it up a bit this season, away

from the all-white theme of

yesteryear. You know, bust out for

some of them big, olden days bulbs

of yellow and green and red. And

for an even stranger reason, I have been rethinking the artificial tree as well. Yeah, it sure is easy, and safe, and doesn’t gum up the old OrickXL. But the perfect symmetry is getting boring.

I know the reasons for faking it were sound when we made the decision, especially given the two-straight years of midnight crashes in the family room and a shrub so out of whack I had to fishing-line-tether it to the baseboards just to make it to Christmas Eve. And it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with pressure from a few of the older ones of our gang who look down their noses at our artificiality. It just seems somehow right, this year above all others, to get real.

Jill comes from a long line of real-tree freaks. Her oldest brother Jack is a graduate of  “The Clark Griswold School of Christmas Tree Selection”, with his firs needing their own zip code, and having to be chopped at the top such that if he didn’t, you could go into his attic and expect to find three feet of greenery sprouting through the ceiling.

Spouse and I have been mulling over this return to basics, the expense, the need for a change, and oh, yeah, did I mention the expense? So the jury is still out. But I have a feeling she is yearning for a return to the green.

As a kid in the ‘50s and ‘60s, I always had a smaller version of Old Tannenbaum. Then plastics became the god of the times, and we went to a white tree, with all blue lights. It was a bit sad, really. But mom thought it was pretty, blue being her favorite color, and good old dad couldn’t have given two shakes about the whole thing. And do you remember those aluminum jobs with the revolving colored light wheel at the base? Yeah, well, at least we never had that lame-o thing. (At least I don’t think we did.)

In our first apartment at Lucas-Hunt Village, Jill and I put up a Charlie Brown-ish little shrub. It was the perfect fit for our space. Of course, her brothers made fun of it. And as the years and the kids came along, and we were able to scrape up the cash, it was off to the Florissant Jaycees lot by Kmart on Lindbergh in search of the perfect tree. Which we never found. Because when we came home and gazed at the terminally-scoliosised bush, the question was, “Hey,Tom… how come it looked so straight at the lot?”

In those days, it was such a magical event to trim the tree and have hot chocolate and put on the ornaments the kids made at school. Listening to Andy Williams or the Osmond Brothers and even the Oak Ridge Boys Christmas albums, as mom carefully unwrapped the ornaments from Grandma… great times, friends. We even got through a few years without bloodshed over whose ornament got front-of-the-tree billing.

Today, not so much. Joanie is the only one still home, and she is busier than a WalMart greeter on Black Friday. So I set up the synthetic replica while watching good old Clark and his Cousin Eddie mangle the holiday, and Jill and I do the honors of ornaments that evening. Which is why we may just go retro this Yuletide. New lights outside and in. A Douglas fir to grace the hearth. A new spirit throughout. But if we do, to paraphrase the police chief in “Jaws” when he first saw the Great White…“We’re gonna need a bigger tree stand.”

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