Sometimes I surprise even myself. I would have thought that I would go to my grave as a “real” tree person. There have been real Christmas trees every year of my life, even the two years living in a teeny apartment (we had a very small table top tree that we placed on the piano). For many years, including up until YA was in high school, the tree was chopped down at one of the many tree farms around the Twin Cities then dragged back to the house atop the car. One year I borrowed a friends pick-up truck; that made it easy – just tossed the tree into the bed of the truck and off we went. Once YA didn’t want to make a day-long ordeal of getting a tree, we moved to the two-minute-drive-to-Bachmans selection process.
YA has been talking about an artificial tree for a couple of years now. She doesn’t like getting sap on her hands and she really doesn’t like the needles on the floor. Since we usually have the tree up from the day after Thanksgiving until New Years, there are always needles. Every time she mentioned these problems, I completely blew her off. Until last year.
For many years Bachmans offered a nice discount to fresh trees on Black Friday. This ended during pandemic, so my wallet had felt that pinch already. Then last year, when we trundled down to see the trees, the sticker shock just about knocked me off my feet. And the selection was pretty sparse as well. It was do bad in fact, that we were actually about to leave to go look for a Boy Scout or Church lot. We found the white pines outside on the lot – sitting on their own. I love white pine but YA does not; they are harder to decorate as they are so thick and the branches are not strong. But the pricing was much better, so we chose one and headed home.
I spent months thinking about YAs arguments in favor of an artificial tree and was finally swayed to “think about it” when she offered to cover at least half of the cost. I had seen the space allotted to artificial trees at Gertens. It was huge, so in October, when we saw the first holiday sale, we headed on over. Honestly I didn’t think this was going to end well. I figured we wander around for about 20 minutes, have a fight and then go home.
I’ve always had lights that fade on and off; I was expecting to be sad that I was losing this option with a fake tree. YA wanted a tree that looked real. I was worried about the whole “fluffing” thing that I’ve heard people talk about. YA was worried about plugging everything in.
Then we met Bonnie. She works the artificial tree lot at Gertens and boy, is she good at her job. She knew EVERYTHING about all the trees but was very good at parsing out her knowledge as you asked and didn’t overwhelm us. We learned quite a bit. First off, many of the trees have rubber tips, so they look quite authentic (just the tips though, the inside branches are paper needles, otherwise the tree would weigh a ton). Many trees now have power poles; you don’t have to mess with plugs. You attach each section and the tree figures it out. AND… although when you look at the trees sitting on display, they all have either white lights or multi-colored lights, it turns out that most trees these days have multiple options. The tree that we liked has six setting. None of them are fade on/fade off, but there are three twinkle settings.
YA wanted one particular tree a lot – enough that she decided she could cover even more than half of the cost. So despite my expectations that we wouldn’t find anything we both liked, we ended up coming home with my first artificial tree. It takes about 8 minutes to put up, from start to finish. I don’t have to put on the lights, we don’t have to water it. Six settings of lights, as I mentioned. And I think it’s lovely.
We had friends over last night to trim the tree and it was easy to decorate and the branches are all strong enough to even the heaviest of our ornaments (a little torito from Peru). I’m really happy with the new tree. Guess you can teach old dogs new tricks every now and then.
Have you ever surprised yourself by changing your mind?
Trail Baboon 