Well the holiday season is upon us and with it come the Christmas tree.  In our case though, it’s more like Christmas trees –plural.  Our first Christmas as a couple, 3 years ago, my wife and I discovered that we decorate our trees VERY differently.  She likes her tree to be very elegant, sticking to no more than 2 colors (the first year it was silver and white, the next it was red and white) while mine has to be gaudy with as many colors, shapes and blinking lights as I can.  I shit you not, you stare at one of my decorated trees long enough you run the risk of going into a seizure.

So that first Christmas (we weren’t living together at the time) we vowed to always get 2 trees; my big gaudy one and her petite classy one.  Low and behold, our first Christmas in our first house together last year we fulfilled that promise.  She got a cute, petite noble fir and I got the Griswold family tree big enough to bend at the ceiling when fully erect.  I loved my tree, although I didn’t have it blink as much as I wanted to (her father was here for the holidays and I didn’t want him go insane from all the flashing) but it did have a lot of color and garland.  Her tree was very lovely and elegant.  She has the red and white look going on with a bit of silver.

This year I opted out of getting the XXXL tree for something that was a mere 7-8 feet; that’s small for me.  But before we even went to the tree farm, Newmans Nobles, we were at New Seasons Market downtown for a quick snack after perusing Powells for a bit.  There they had LIVE trees… hehehehe.  You must know, I love pine trees (noble firs, blue spruces, you name it) and I want one for our yard which is lacking in that department.  About a year and a half ago I did get a red wood but that’s another story.  So, being the marketing suckers that we are, we bought a little 4 foot live noble fir.  We’ll put it on our porch for now and hopefully find a home for it in our yard… at the very least we’ll keep it in the pot and put it on one of our balconies.  So, that was our first tree of the season.  

Today, without really planning to do it this weekend, we decided to go to the tree farm we went to last year and pick out 2 trees.  We take the dogs of course because they’re part of our family and you pick out trees with your family, right?  So they run around marking their territory (Brian alone pee’d on well over a dozen trees –my apologies to the family(ies) who will be smelling noble fir scented with urine this year in their homes).  After they ran around, we put them back in the truck and finally started looking for our trees.  Fairly quickly we had cornered and marked our trees, albeit without urine.  Rather we tied little blue doggie poop bags (minus any poop) to our respective trees and called for somebody with a chainsaw.  

In the end, my tree came out to about 7 and a half feet while Nikki’s came it at a little over 6 feet.  They’re in the garage and we’ll move them in sometime this week, both in the living room together, for the decorating.  Hers elegant, mine gaudy both lovely… an opposite attraction that makes the holidays grand for us.