Our First Christmas Tree

A few weeks ago we went shopping for our first Christmas tree. The big question was real or fake?

Growing up, my family always had a fake tree that we'd assemble and then decorate with those glass ball ornaments, tinsel, a few ornaments (like two) that my brother and I made as school projects, lights and a star at the top. Hmmm...I bet my parents still have that baked angel (I think) ornament stored in the Christmas box, collecting dust in the garage. Maybe I should go rescue it. But I digress. It wasn't until I was in high school that we started getting a real tree for Christmas. I loved getting the tree every year. It became a tradition for our family to go pick out a tree at the local tree lot the day after Thanksgiving and decorate it. We'd leave that tree up until the day after my brother's birthday. Mind you, my brother's birthday is January 15. I didn't really mind because the tree made our house feel festive, and I loved the smell of a real tree.

Greg's family was the opposite of mine. They had a real tree when they were kids and then switched a fake tree as they got older. I think his parents tree is really nice. They have unique ornaments to mark special events that happened during the year. I really like that and plan to do the same thing for our tree. In fact, we bought a puau shell angel ornament from New Zealand for our yet-to-be-purchased tree!

Now that we're married and have our own home, should we get a real tree or a fake tree? I can see the pros and cons of both options. A real tree smells great and looks great, but it's not really environmentally friendly, is more maintenance and can be quite pricey. And since we don't have much space in our living/family room, it'd be hard to find a small-ish real tree that didn't look like the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. With a fake tree, it just doesn't smell like Christmas. But it is more environmentally friendly, easier to maintain, cheaper, and we could probably find one that will fit well in our living/family room.

So, after looking at a couple of real trees and fake trees, we bought a fake pre-lit tree. It's 4.5 ft tall and fits perfectly in our front bay window! It sits on top of an end table. There's no space to put gifts under the tree because the tree takes up most of the space on the table. We don't have a tree topper for it yet. It looks slightly sparse because we don't have a ton of ornaments, but we'll add an ornament every year. I'm really excited about our tree because it's our tree, and we'll create our own traditions for decorating it.