Basically what I looked like, except I had a larger axe
GateHouse — We never cut down our own Christmas trees when I was a kid, mostly because it turned out that they sold objects very similar to Christmas trees at the Target in Marion, Ind. — and get this: You could hardly tell the difference! Well, there were a few giveaways: Instead of dropping crisp needles all over the carpet the fake ones appeared majestic and invincible for what was sometimes months (taking down the Christmas tree is super-boring), and instead of having to be cut down they could be disassembled like Legos and returned to their spot in the attic. That said, instead of smelling like fresh forest pine they smelled like a Target in Marion, Ind.
As such, Christmas was as much about getting out the tree as it was getting out the box the tree spent most of its year in. Being lucky enough to have both a Christmas-loving family and large ceilings (mostly the latter), our tree was a beast, a monstrous army-grade Artifical Douglas Fraser Fir Pine something (OK you got me I cheated my way through horticulture) that came in a box large enough to, if needed, store the car.
When you are a small person, boxes of course are the coolest toys ever, or at least up there with such perennial childhood chestnuts as bubble wrap, pieces of broken cement, packing peanuts and handfuls of gravel. This year marks my 36th of wondering what in the hell we’re all doing departing Thanksgiving dinner to camp under neon signs for off-brand tablet computers when if we give every kid in the country a pile of UPS bubble wrap, packing material and about 30 pounds of dirt kids would all be murderous-eyed with joy (except of course for the selfish materialistic ones, but we could just throw gravel at them).
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GateHouse
