"After 30 minutes of trimming that evoked all the wonder of assembling an Ikea coffee table, we had a "tree." It didn't look bad. But it felt wrong—counterfeit, like a hunk of PVC posing as nature, shipped across an ocean to mock us in our own living room. I missed the tiny, quaint delights that come with inviting a piece of the forest into one's home: the soft pinch of pine needles, the sweet resin smell, the jolt of domestic accomplishment from watering the stump."
"My current fake tree, acquired on a dreary late-fall day in 2019 when I desperately needed some cheer, is objectively awful. It's the saddest 12-inch faux fir you ever saw; it's scraggly and obviously plastic and conspicuously bare, with built-in multicolored lights that look oddly aggressive when they strobe. But it reminds me of the tree in A Charlie Brown Christmas, a scrawny sapling that the gang initially hates but comes around to in the end, because the holiday season-imagine this-isn't actually about buying"
One account describes a childhood allergy that led to using an artificial tree, which felt counterfeit and lacked the pine scent, needle pinch, and ritual of a real stump. The allergy later receded and the family returned to a live tree, restoring the sensory and domestic pleasures. Another account describes a severe asthma attack from a live tree and a preference for fake trees for health and convenience. The speaker embraces an imperfect, scraggly faux tree that evokes the Charlie Brown sapling and emphasizes holiday meaning as shared joy rather than material quality.
Read at Washingtonian - The website that Washington lives by.
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