by Carole Devine

Created on: December 10, 2009

We never had a real Christmas tree in my childhood home until my brother and I, the last of six children, were old enough to drive to the nursery in the next town to get one ourselves.  Every year, about three days before Christmas, my father would ascend up the attic stairs to wrestle the large, tattered cardboard box containing our artificial tree down to the first floor.  There, in the corner of our living room, he would unceremoniously put each wire and plastic pine needle ‘branch’ in its respective hole in the tree’s ‘trunk,’ unbending the most crooked branches to make them look somewhat realistic.  While he would also haul the various boxes and bags of ornaments downstairs, decorating the tree was not his forte so my mother and my brothers and sisters and I would take over from this point.  

Many artificial trees today actually look like real trees.  Our tree , even in its heydays, with its shiny green pole of a trunk and its faux branches spaced just a tad too far apart from each other,  did not look like anything you’d encounter in a forest.  Time had not been kind to our tree either. Over the years, some of the branches on this artificial tree were lost and, every Christmas, my father would have to arrange the tree in such a way that the missing branches would not be visible to guests.   My parents had purchased the tree in the early 1960s and, by the 80s, its branches were so sparse that our tree was beginning to resemble Charlie Brown’s famous Christmas tree.

In 1982, my brother, who had gotten his driver’s license in the spring of that year, decided enough was enough and that we should get a ‘real’ tree.  I was with him one hundred percent.  We had friends who had real trees and somehow it made Christmastime in their homes feel more authentic.  Maybe it was the smell of pine or the fullness of the branches, but being in a house with a real Christmas tree made us all the more disappointed in our artificial one.  My mother said we could get a tree so long as we paid for it and put it up ourselves.  Since my brother was employed at a local restaurant, he decided he could swing the $25 to get a real Christmas pine or fir.  I was recruited to help him chose one and bring it home.

As putting up the tree as close to Christmas day possible had been the family tradition, we waited until three days before Christmas to

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