More holiday miracles: the little Christmas tree that almost wasn’t

This year Colleen and I truly had a Chanukah Christmas miracle in finding our tree.

Here’s the story. When I was growing up, our tree was the kind of thing that could make you cry just looking at it, the kind of tree that you’d imagine the Grinch using just to spite Christmas, the kind of tree that had branches made out of glorified coathangers and only about seven branches at that. I can’t remember ever not having that tree, which means we had it for at least fifteen years; maybe more. It was old, but in reusing it year after year I convinced myself that we were preserving the environment (or something). Colleen’s family, on the other hand, has never used an artificial tree, so this whole Plastic or Paper tree thing was shaping up to be a big trauma this year; it didn’t make sense to have a real tree with the warm weather, and it seemed almost dangerous in light of all the cats our roommate has; what if poor Muffy or Trixie (real names changed for privacy… or were they?) ate some pine needles and had indigestion? So, plastic tree it was; platic is, after all, much better for the digestive system.

Apparently, though, everyone in East County San Diego buys their trees on Thursday, because when we tried to find one Friday - whew, it was brutal. I remember calling a certain Home Improvement store and them actually sneering on the phone: you mean you want a fake tree?

Luckily, just before we gave up hope, one of the places we called had a tree, and they had it in our price range - very, very cheap. We checked the picture online, saw that it was scraggly but passable, and decided that if it was sad enough we’d just name it Steve and love it like our strange but endearing child. We got to the store and they’d put their very last tree (well, last one of this kind) on hold for us, and whoever put it on hold? Had, for some reason, marked it with a twenty-five dollar discount. So the big Christmas miracle was that, thanks to our handy-dandy gift card, we totally got our Christmas tree for free. Best of all, he’s not Mr. Scraggles, no! He’s tall! And mighty! A Rustic Oregon Pine! And we, in our infinite wisdom, have decided that his name is Sir Wilhelm Frederick Wilhelm III. We call him Big Willy for short.