The first year that Alison and I lived together was the first year we marched out into the woods and cut down our Christmas tree.  It marked the start of a new tradition for us, and in the 13 years that have followed she has supported and shown patience for my tendency toward such things.  For me it has never been solely about the tree itself, but rather the pomp and circumstance that surrounds it.  We earmark a day in the calendar, sometime around the first weekend of December.  We rearrange the furniture to make room.  We pick our spot.  We hike through the rows upon rows of conifers, hot chocolate in one hand, our trusty saw in the other.  Sometimes it’s snowing, sometimes it’s raining, most often it’s both.  Once our toes begin to grow numb we narrow down our search, finally making a decision and we begin the process of chopping, dragging, lifting, tying, driving and ultimately hauling it into the house where, with a 13 for 13 record streak, I need to haul it back out again because I’ve chosen one just ‘slightly’ too tall for our ceilings (estimating height in a wide open field is clearly not one of my skill sets).  Once I have trimmed a good 3-4 feet from the bottom and we have everything in place, the cleanup begins – the sweeping of fallen needles, the removal of a nest we didn’t initially catch, and the unfortunate business of sap. It’s a messy, arduous, time consuming, expensive, and I love it.

As the years went by and our duo became a family of four, the kids also grew attached to this tradition; or perhaps to put it more accurately: they became attached to how much this tradition has meant to me.  They are more interested in the hot chocolate and throwing snowballs than they are in helping Dad haul a giant tree across a field and strapping it to the van.  Fair.  Where their excitement truly kicks in, however, is when the decorations come up from the basement.  They tear off the lids of tote after tote, while I pour the hot cider and get our soundtrack of all the classics setup in the background, then we meet back at the tree where we do our best to untangle the rats nest of hooks, and begin hanging ornament after ornament of memories past until slowly but surely the tree becomes our own.  After so much effort and a time, we step back to evaluate our work, and when all is just as it needs to be, I hoist one of the kiddos onto my shoulders to place the star on top.  We dim the lights, top our glasses and pause.  And it’s in that pause; that small, tiny moment, that the holidays truly begin for me.  In that moment I have so many memories stored from my own childhood experiences of decorating with my family around the living room; Alvin and the chipmunks faithfully humming through speakers as the vinyl spins tunes I only got to experience but once a year.  My brother and I staring at the tree in awe of the magic of Santa and the season as a whole.  My parents encouraging the wonder that then filled our home, and, now, that same encouragement passing through me to my own wonderful children.  All in a moment.  So, this year, in recognizing that the thing I look forward to most in the whole Christmas Tree endeavour has very little to do with the act of cutting down a tree, we decided to purchase a fake one.   Gasp!

Do I consider myself a man of tradition, sentiment and emotion on any given day?  Yes,  but that does not mean, nor should it imply that I am incapable of change.  The decision to move from bark and needles to metal and plastic, was made with the previously mentioned considerations in mind.  There will still be ornaments, there will still be cider and music, and the excitement of bringing all those boxes out of the basement is not going anywhere anytime soon.  Most important of all – there will still be the moment we step back and admire the twinkling lights of our home.  I will miss the ritual of wagon rides, hot chocolate, trekking through the weather to stake our claim on the Beandricks’ Family Christmas Tree and that fresh pine-scent, but I will not miss the clean-up, the cost, or the embarrassment of putting my dead tree out the curb in middle of summer, and I’ve got a Glad plug-in wafting the bouquet of Christmas through the room positioned strategically next to our happy, synthetic replacement.  New traditions can be formed to make up for any of the short-comings we may have; we will find other reasons to hike through the wintery wonderland of various Ontario forests.  We will find wagon rides we didn’t know we were missing, and snow balls will fly with or without a tree chopping ceremony.

The other uptick of this whole endeavour is that, with the fears of our fresh-cut tree dying by putting it up too early vanquished entirely, we can now get our whole festive season started earlier!  I made sure to run this by my wonderful and incredibly supportive wife (who said yes) before we committed to purchase of a replicant tree, and I’m making sure I document the agreement here, so that I can refer back to it November 12th, 2024, when I make my plea to start getting the decorations up.  With that alone in mind, how I didn’t consider making this change sooner has me feeling slightly embarrassed, but I’ll get over that next year when the girls and I start our countdown.  Now, if I only I can figure out a convincing way to get the advent calendar started at the same time…