O Christmas Tree

What kind of Christmas tree do you get? Growing up we always had a real tree. I love the smell, the feel, and the look of a real tree. I have fond memories of going to the Christmas tree farm and cutting our own tree. The joy of decorating the tree was glorious.

Thankfully, we have had several opportunities in Little Bear's lifetime to go cut down our own tree. When we lived farther north it was wonderful at Christmas time. The tree farms were like magic. Living here the soil is sandy and the very few tree farms are different. The type of trees is just not the same. They consider juniper's to be Christmas trees and some other strange varieties as Christmas trees.

I had my first fake tree as an adult. I was newly married to my first husband and he wanted a fake tree. Not gonna lie having a fake tree broke my heart a little.

Now, with Popeye, we have decorated fake trees more often than I would like, but sometimes it has been out of necessity. We have celebrated Christmas with extended family at Thanksgiving several times and put up the fake tree before tree farms were even opened. Then, there have been a couple of times that we have had an extremely early Christmas before deployments. A fake tree works for that and I still find joy in decorating it. Honestly, some of my most memorable Christmas decorating memories have been with fake trees.

First, there were several years my grandparents had a small fiber optic Christmas tree. This little tree was in style when they bought it. My grandparents thought it was so neat. The rest of us liked it the first couple of years and then the tree started making a high pitched noise. The noise was terrible. We mentioned it to my grandparents for a couple of years and they could never hear it. They finally agreed that it must be true since we all complained about it two Christmas seasons in a row. That was the last of the fiber optic tree.

This year and last year we had a small fake tree. We decorated well before Thanksgiving last year. Decorating that small fake tree as a family knowing we would not actually be celebrating gathered around it together on Christmas morning was a mix of sadness and joy on my part. The best part was in the several months we left the Christmas tree up Little Bear and I laughed about decorating with Popeye. We wore our Santa hats and decorated. We laughed and made memories.

This year we decorated that same little fake tree before Thanksgiving. We celebrated Christmas at Thanksgiving with Popeye's parents. I won't let the fake tree stop me from joy at Christmas, but I won't lie and say I don't miss a real tree.