I am not, for the record, a believer in fake plastic trees. (Radiohead would agree, I think.)
I am, however, a pragmatist. Or a realist. Whatever you would call a person who, while holding a deep loathing of garishly green plastic trees, also understands that while they do not smell woodsy and wonderful and fresh, they are infinitely easier to handle, cleaner, and oftentimes more practical than dragging in a fresh tree to slowly die in your living room while dropping its little needles all over the floor.
Knowing that the sad little pine trees that get shipped to Hawaii during Christmas lack something in authenticity and freshness and knowing that our next two Christmases will be spent in a foreign land that may or may not have trees readily available, David and I decided to purchase a fake tree.
The other thing you should know about living on an island is that if you see something at the store, you buy it then and there or else it may not be there again for a very long time....or never again. (There was a month period when I swear there was not a single box of Cinnamon Life on the entire island. And I looked. When it reappeared again, I bought 4 boxes. And I grab a box everytime I go to the store, even if we don't need it. The moral of the story is, you never know when something you love may not be there anymore so buy it now!) Anyway....I saw a tree at Wal-Mart that I liked. They had six boxes so I thought I'd bring David back later and pick one up. (It was too big to lift myself and there were six. Surely they'd still be there the next day!) Long story short, when we came back, they were gone. So we picked up a smaller tree just in case. (Like I said, if you see something and you think you may want it, you buy it! You can always return it. It's a state motto or something.)
Still, if I was going to suffer through having a fake tree, I wanted a really nice one. I didn't want some dinky one that obviously was completely fake. So, I dropped by Wal-Mart on my way home from work yesterday and lo and behold, they had 3 boxes of my big, beautiful tree. I grabbed a friendly Wal-Mart associate (who was actually not so friendly) to help me lift the box into my cart and I was off!
I was terribly excited about the tree, so I convinced David to ignore his homework to help me put together the tree.
Here I am surrounded by all the groups of branches. One thing I did not know about fake trees is how dang long it takes to fluff out all the individual branches. And those fake needles sting just as much as the real ones. But they don't feel like pin-pricks of Christmas joy to me.
Here's our tree in the process of being erected. It was pretty good looking, as far as fake trees go.
And here's David doing a last bit of fluffing before putting the last piece on top.
So after an hour of fluffing and fitting all the branches into their little cubby holes, we had one beautiful (albeit fake) Christmas tree.
There was only one minor problem....
It was way too big for our little condo. I didn't take the width into consideration when selecting the tree....only the height. With our 7.5 feet tall and 5 feet wide tree scrunched in one corner, there was no room for both our couches or our little dining room table in the living room. Either the tree or the couch had to go.
Luckily, we still had the smaller tree we had purchased before so today we spent another good 45 minutes dismantling the plastic beast and re-packaging it to go back to Wal-Mart and we set about erecting and decorating our new tree.
This one fit a lot better. And it had fewer branches which meant less fluffing. All in all, it was a good decision to use the smaller one. It does look far more fake than the bigger, more expensive tree but it is a lot smaller and will therefore require less storage space. Which is good because we're running out of room.
This isn't the best picture of our tree, but it's hard to capture it in its full glory. I love a Christmas tree all lit up and decorated. It's one of my favorite things about Christmas.
Here's a close-up of the red ornaments and pretty ribbon I used to decorate the tree with.
And our tree from below. Even though it's fake and it doesn't smell like anything, it's still David's and my first Christmas tree as a married couple and it looks beautiful and feels special to me nonetheless.
Besides, if I need to sniff something that smells good, I'll just go hoover over these tasty cinnamon rolls I made yesterday.
And then I'll eat one. Yum.
