My wife and I have been using a fake, four foot Christmas tree since our days in DC. We’ve never had a grown up people tree, so we decided to finally get that stamp in the passport of life. It’ll go right next to the “endure three hours with a door-to-door vacuum salesman” stamp that we earned in October.

On an impulse, we decided to buy a real tree this year. Like always, that impulse cost us a small fortune. Not only did we have to pay for an eight foot Frazier fir, but we also had to buy a stand, a skirt, lights, a topper, and some grown up people ornaments. We own several ornaments, but most of them are those little Hallmark collections that celebrate cartoon characters. You know, tiny Peter Pans and Tiggers and R2D2s and all the other symbols of the dreaded Consumer-Entertainment Complex. They’re just too small for a big tree. So after burning a few hundred bucks, we opened our arms and hearts to this slowly dying plant that will leak sap and shed needles all over my hardwood floors for the next five weeks.