My family always had a real Christmas tree - no exceptions.

Sure, real trees can be a bit of a pain, but they always make for good memories. For starters, my family is from Pennsylvania. My mother and father moved to Greenville, South Carolina, right before I was born. In our part of PA, the tradition is to put your tree up the week leading up to Christmas Eve. In our part of SC, it seems like the tree has to be up Thanksgiving afternoon.

That being said, we were always the transplanted (no pun intended) Yankees standing at the Christmas tree farm 3 days before Christmas Eve. Of course, all the great/good/decent/still living trees has been chosen already, and we often settled for a very "Charlie Brown" sort of thing.

Once we had our glorified branch tied to the top of our car, we headed back home, where we always faced our next challenge; making the tree trunk fit into the stand.

The trunk was always too thick, crooked, lumpy or sappy. We hacked off lower branches until we found a straight part of the trunk and rigged that into the stand. One year, in desperation, we tied the top of our tree to the ceiling to keep it upright. 

Another year, after a couple of days inside our warm house, a million tiny spider eggs hatched from the branches and infested our tree. That was a nice moment.  

But we always had fun decorating and lighting the tree, regardless of the troubles we had beforehand. And the pine-needle smell ranks right up there with presents and Christmas Eve church service.

I have only once dealt with an artificial tree, and it was more like  "preparation" and less like "decoration." 

Step 1: Find the dusty box that holds your artificial tree.

Step2: Leave box outside (because it's dusty) and bring in tree.

Step 3: Unfold branches and spread base supports.

Step 4: There is no Step 4. That's all you do with artificial trees.

Artificial trees are easier, that's for sure, but Christmas is all about family time and the memories involved with the season. A real tree provides ample material for memories, and artificial trees seem to be another example of our tendency to want the benefits from a situation without having to work for it.

So what do you think- Are you going with real or artificial this year?

What memories do you have from decorating a tree?

Did anybody actually read this whole blog?