There must be a light under the bushel!

Ye Olde Christmas Tree

When I moved out of the house to go to college, I decided I was going to get one of those huge department store Christmas trees. You know the kind, full and bright with beautiful white lights and a color scheme.

Well, I got real trees for several years, but I only wanted the flocked trees, with all the pretty white snowy stuff. I bought only silver and red ornaments to go on the tree so it would be classy and festive.

I got tired of the white trees after awhile, so I switched to live green trees. Now those are a pain in the ass! One of them died before Christams arrived, so I had to throw it away several days before Christmas. How depressing. (I really did water it!) But, I was tired of stepping on dry needles, and I really didn't want my house to catch on fire! Plus, every time you walked near the tree, a shower of needles would rain down, so you had to constantly vacuum.

So, the time came to get my dream tree. I got a Douglas Fir (a fake one) that I would be able to use every year and it would last forever. It was about nine feet tall and so full that it took forever to put the lights on it. I broadened my color scheme, but everything still had to match perfectly.

You see, we had the same tree all through my childhood, one my mom loved because it had plenty of room for the ornaments to hang where you could clearly see them. She also used all those colored lights and ornaments that were homemade or had some special meaning. I always wanted a tree with more umphh, bigger, more showy. So, I went through my string of searching for the best tree.

My mom put the tree up last week, the same one from my childhood. It's the perfect tree. All of the colors you can imagine shine from it, and it couldn't be more beautiful. I don't know how the tree managed to change, but surely I couldn't have missed the specialness of that tree, only to turn away from it to search for something better. Isn't it amazing how perspectives change as you get older?

So now I have this huge damned tree sitting in my storage unit taking up a lot of space, and I'll probably never use it again. How can I when there's really nothing special about it. It looks like every other department store tree.