My favorite thing about this time of the year is the lights. I’m not fond of those big, awkward blow-up decorations that started appearing a few years back or the mechanical stuff or anything too over-the-top….just lights thank you. A simple light-filled tree in the yard or a string of lights along a deck (especially if the deck is on the water and the lights reflect off the water) are the perfect holiday addition.

And there has to be a Christmas tree in the house.

When my parents were married in 1950, my Dad worked as a florist. After developing severe skin allergies he made the logical Dad-like move and went into the artificial flower business. First they were made of plastic and, later, silk; in some cases the silk flowers look more real than real flowers.

Buying a quality artificial Christmas tree can cost a mint. When I was a kid my Dad could have brought home the Rolls Royce of artificial Christmas trees from his place of business for free but his family (me, my sister and my Mom) INSISTED on a real Christmas tree.

“It smells so good!”

“It wouldn’t really be Christmas without a REAL tree”

“Fake trees are icky”

So every holiday season there was always a trip to the local nursery to buy a REAL Christmas tree.

Along with the real tree, my parents had a ceramic tree with tiny multi-colored lights like gemstones that stood about a foot tall. Every Christmas they would put this little ceramic tree out on a table in front of the picture window in our living room. Even though it wasn’t a REAL tree, I always loved that little ceramic tree.

About 20 years ago I came to live in Connecticut, in a house my husband was renting in Stamford. A few weeks before our first Christmas together we bought a real Christmas tree and set it up in front of our living room window. We had two cats that were just over a year old. Suffice it to say the tree spent more time tipped over on its side than standing up in its red cast iron tree stand that I had bought from LL Bean. In subsequent years we decided, since we weren’t spending the holiday at home anyway but were instead shuttling between my family in New York and Bob’s in New Jersey, we’d decorate the house minus a tree.

After a few years at that house we got tired of our crazy landlord (there was a story circulating that when he lived in the house he once was arrested for shooting a gun off from the roof while naked; as if shooting a gun off from your roof wasn’t nuts enough the “while naked” part just took it to a whole new level of crazy) and on a sunny Labor Day weekend went looking for a better place to rent. We found it in one day; an adorable little cottage a few blocks from the water with a huge stone fireplace and plenty of neat nooks and crannies and quirks (not counting the two of us). We learned our cottage had originally been a chicken coop for a farm and was later converted to human living quarters. Just a few months after we moved in to our little chicken coop cottage, the holidays rolled around and we reconsidered a Christmas tree. We still had the cats though they were now a few years older and a bit less interested in destroying things (otherwise known as “playing”). One of the little nooks in the living room was just right for a 3 foot tree; it would stand on a built-in bench about eighteen inches off the floor and out of kitty target range.

And so our Christmas tree was back and, of course, REAL.

We rented the cottage for about eight years until we got tired of THAT crazy landlady and her drunkard boyfriend and, with interest rates falling lower each day, we decided it would cost us as much to pay rent as it would to pay a mortgage.

With housing and taxes on that housing being less expensive along the shoreline in New Haven County versus Fairfield County, up the shoreline we moved. It look us a painfully long ten months to get our house but, in the end, we got the best house of all the ones we had looked at. And believe me there were A LOT of houses that we looked at and several that we went to contract on and ALL of them fell through (but that is another story). Suffice it to say that I learned a lot about buying a house.

We moved into our first house (as homeowners) the day after Thanksgiving, 2002.

Yup…the holidays were upon us! Is there a place to put a tree?

After much discussion and contemplation we decided that putting up a real Christmas tree would be more trouble than it was worth. We still were not home much over the holidays and the layout of our house would require way too much rearranging. We settled for decorating the house without getting a tree.

In 2005 my Dad got sick (Mom had passed away 5 years earlier) and ended up at an assisting living facility. When my sister and I were faced with the heartbreaking and physically and emotionally exhausting task of cleaning out our parents only home (and the home in which we had grown up) I took the little ceramic Christmas tree. At holiday time we brought it to Dad and set it up in his room; he loved it. After Christmas I brought it to my house and packed it away until I would bring it back to him again next year.

But that never happened.

Dad had to be relocated to a nursing home because his health worsened and he no longer had a place for the little ceramic tree (nor did he have much interest in it). I doubt he misses the little ceramic tree because he likely doesn’t remember it.

And so it is Christmas 2009 and the third holiday season that the little ceramic tree will sit on a table in the window of my living room on the Connecticut shoreline.

In my wise old age, the little kid who once insisted on only a REAL Christmas tree has come to understand that a real tree isn’t always the best tree. My little ceramic tree might not be real but it will always remind me of my family and that, afterall, is what matters most.

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