There ain't no soul in plastic
We put up our tree last week, and it's beautiful. It's fake and petite and 90 percent of the ornaments are at the bottom, reflecting the height of my children (its chief decorators). It's a perfect Christmas tree shape, which is what you get from a plastic tree.
When I was little, my parents used to drag us out to cut down a tree off our property. We lived on 80-plus acres of former tobacco farm, composed of both field and forest, but there were very few pines around. Instead, we had cedars, which is to say that for the first 18 years of my life, our tree looked like a giant shrub in the corner of the living room.
Cedars smell exactly the way Christmas should smell, but decorated they look tawdry and cheap. Their branches are skinny and spindly, meaning ornaments make them droop, but their tops are broad and wild, like over-teased whorehouse hair. Every year I despaired of ever having a normal-looking Christmas tree. I wanted something more like a geometrical triangle, broad and strong at the bottom and narrow at the top, like a decorative German beer stein. I wanted "O Tannenbaum," not "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer."
