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FRANK PIECES: Why We Don't Have A Real Christmas Tree

by FRANK O'DONNELL
November 2004

Every year at the holidays, one visitor or another to our house will inspect our Christmas tree and wonder why we don't have a real tree. "Real trees are so much better than artificial," they'll say. "It's not really Christmas without a real Christmas tree."

There was a time when I believed that too.

Back when I was a kid, we had a fake tree. But back then, plastic was replacing everything, and it was almost cool to have a fake tree. We would make the annual trek up to the attic, tossing aside the accumulations of the summer and digging out the taped-and-tied cardboard box that held our holiday hedge.

We'd lug it downstairs and empty its contents onto the living room floor. Lower trunk in base, check. Upper trunk inserted into lower trunk, check. Big boughs on the bottom, check. Little boughs on top, check. Trident-shaped top inserted into upper trunk, check. Toss on a few decorations and affix a lighted angel to the top. Make a few adjustments to the base to keep the whole thing from tipping over, and we were set for another year.

As I grew older, and the tree got more disheveled with every use, I vowed that when I was out on my own, I'd have a real tree. When my wife and I first got married, we thought about going au natural (tree-wise, that is), but we lived in a series of small apartments, and it didn't make sense to have the genuine article.

But when we moved into our own house, which sported a pretty large living room, we took the plunge.

For the first couple of years, we went to the local tree lots and picked out a tree. Take it home, set it in its base, fill the base with water, and decorate. The scent of fresh pine was exhilarating, and convinced us that we'd made the right decision.

When our oldest daughter, Elyse, was three, we made the next step. "Why don't we go to a farm to pick out this year's Christmas tree?" I suggested. Karen was eight months pregnant with our second daughter, Kayla – scheduled for arrival on Christmas Day, no less – but she was game.

So off we trudged to Exeter, where we asked a toothless fellow with a chainsaw to decapitate a tree for us, please.

We threw it in the trunk, secured the trunk lid with bungee cords and drove our tree to its new home.

Let it stand outside for a day, they instructed us, to get used to the fact that it's been disconnected from its roots. Then put it inside, filling the tree stand with a mixture of water and aspirin – to help it get over the pain of being disconnected from its roots, I guess.

So, there we were, one Saturday night in December, decorating our new tree. Lights sparkled, ornaments new and old glistened and glittered, and a Christmas star rotated properly at the tip of the tree. It sat proudly in our picture window, getting accustomed to its new rootless environment and the central role it was to play in our holiday celebration.

The next morning, the sun had barely crested the eastern horizon when there was a blood-curdling scream from my living room. She's in labor! I thought, springing from my bed.

Okay, I've never actually sprung from anything in my life. But I did hurry to the living room. And there was Karen, standing in the middle of the living room, both hands covering her mouth.

"Is it the baby?" I worried, grabbing her shoulders.

She slowly removed one hand from her mouth, index finger pointing at the wall.
Her contorted face evoked memories of Hitchcockian victims about to meet their doom. "Look!"

I looked where she was pointing, but couldn't see anything.

Our wall is completely mirrored at that end of the room, with a fireplace in the middle. If all had been right with the world, I should have seen our reflections.
Instead, I saw nothing.

Had we turned into vampires? I wondered.

That's when I noticed that the wall was moving. A little to the right, a little to the left, then up, then down. The motion was fluid, and the wall was green.

It was covered with thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of little green bugs. The tree we'd truncated was getting its last laugh at our expense. It had been home to a mass of bug eggs.

Our 70-degree environment was enough to convince the bugs that it was springtime, and out they popped.

In the wild, the majority of them would have fallen victim to one predator or another – that's why bugs lay so many eggs, to give the species the chance to survive another species' lunchtime.

Here in my not-so-wild living room, they were allowed to exist unmolested, to thrive on my four walls.

Under normal circumstances, we would have simply burned the house down. Okay, maybe employ one of those bug bombs. But due to Karen's delicate condition, we couldn't use any insecticide.

So, we stripped the tree of its decorations. Karen scrubbed each and every one with disinfectant soap. We decided not to try to salvage the lights, tossing the tree, lights and all, into the backyard.

Karen packed up Elyse and brought her to my brother-in-law's house while I vacuumed up all the little critters up.

I picked up Karen and Elyse, and we drove down the street to a discount department store. For $89 plus tax, we picked up a decent artificial tree.

Fourteen Christmases later, it sits in its taped-and-tied cardboard box under the steps, waiting to be assembled and decorated.

Where it will chuckle in a hollow, plastic sort of way each time one of our visitors asks, "Why don't you get a real tree? And why do your ornaments smell like Lysol?"