Christmas Traditions

I'm a creature of habit. Meaning I live and die by holiday traditions. But mainly just Christmas traditions.

The prime example? A real Christmas trees. We would go the weekend of Thanksgiving to the tree farm to pick our tree out, we would cut it down the week before Christmas and set it up on my brother's birthday (the 22nd), lights on on the 23rd, and decorate on Christmas Eve. Mind you then it normally stayed up through January. But this is what we did EVERY year for the first 25 years of my life.

So last year, I was dead set on getting a real tree for our first Christmas as a married couple. We went to a church around the corner that had a huge tent of trees and bought one. They strapped it to the top of Doug's car and we got it into our apartment relatively easy. And it was perfect and beautiful and I loved it. 

I love Christmas :)

It was all fine and dandy until after Christmas. We kept forgetting to water it and were too lazy to take it out. Finally, we had decent weather one Saturday like halfway through January and decided it was finally time. Thing is, with the forgetting to water it, it had dried out and all the needles were falling out. By the time we got it out of our apartment, down the hall, into the elevator and outside? The entire building was COVERED with pine needles. 

We had to take a broom/vacuum through the entire building to clean up pine needles. And apparently didn't do a very good job because our maintenance guy neighbor told us the cleaning lady had been bitching about whoever had spread pine needles through the entire building because they were impossible to vacuum. Oops.

This year? Doug put his foot down and said we had to buy a fake tree. I went into Target yesterday to find one. The 6 foot one that was on sale for $20? SO damn small. The super awesome 7.5 foot one? 250 fricken dollars. 

And as I stood in the Christmas tree aisle for longer than I'm proud to admit, I got seriously emotional about buying a fake Christmas tree. I called Doug and he consoled me, saying that it would only be this year because I've already stated we WILL have a real tree when we buy a house (yes, hopefully house hunting posts will be coming in the nearish future. 

So I grabbed the 6 foot sad fake tree for $20 and brought it home. Where we will decorate the shit out of it and it will be perfect. And next year? I'll have a real tree AND set up the fake tree and be even more awesome.

Christmas traditions are something I hold near and dear to my heart. It is my favorite holiday, due in large part to these family traditions. But getting married means making new traditions with my husband. It means that I can't be at my parents house from the 22-25 to set up and decorate the tree. And it means I have to compromise on my desire for a real tree. But just this year....