How Lovely Are Your Branches

Mine has been a longstanding love affair with the Tannenbaum.

(Zie Tannenbaum? Zer Tannenbaum? Whatever - it's one of the three gendered articles.)

When I was a kid, one of the highlights of the Christmas season was bundling up, piling into our car, and driving for about eight hours to the tree farm.

(It was really 45 minutes. Which is interminable when one is under 10 years old.)

We would go up and down the rows, searching for the perfect tree. I remember my brothers chasing each other through the trees and me pretending I was in some otherworldly Narnia-ish fantasy forest.

That and having to go to the bathroom. I somehow always had to go, but of course we couldn't head back to XmasTreeHQ without a prize, so I danced and shifted my weight through the duration of the search.

Once we'd found The One, Dad cut it down and we returned triumphant to the parking lot, where he tied it to the roof while the rest of us had hot chocolate and processed cheese slices. Which we called "chocolate cheese." Because it has a wrapper, you see.

Home we went, and we vibrated impatiently while waiting for it to thaw and then for Mom to put on the lights. Because after that came one of the bestest parts of the season - decorating.

We had Winnie the Pooh. We had Snow White and the Seven (Worse for the Wear of the Years) Dwarves. We had styrofoam balls with sequins pinned on; wreaths made of lace, beads, and hardened hot glue drips; and increasingly mangy tinsel.

It was awesome.

But the awesomest was what happened after we were finished. The twinkly lights were on, everyone else was occupied, and I would sneak into the corner between the tree and the wall into my own private fairy world where I could be unnoticed and unremarked upon and indulge my greatest passion.

Organizing.

I would carefully study the placement of all the ornaments near me, judge their spatial relationships to one another, and oh so quietly make adjustments until every one was in perfect, organized harmony.

(Yes. I could be persuaded to agree with your widened eyes and muffled snickers that this may indeed have been a manifestation of a mild case of OCD. It wasn't restricted to ornaments - I used to spend hours while my mom did the grocery shopping, standing at the end of the aisles and rearranging the candy displays so that all the chocolate bars were facing the same way and bringing some semblance of order to the chaos caused when someone thoughtlessly threw a Kit Kat bar into the Coffee Crisp box.)

The Tree was such a huge part of getting ready for me that I've always tried to make a big deal of it with my kids. They're not always happy about it - I remember two years ago lugging a tree along the street, kids wailing that they were missing all the good shows, and gritting my teeth and telling them to have fun, dangit!

But usually they get into it, as they did this year:

Yes. A camouflage Santa hat. I know.

Getting to the top branches.

Apparently cozying up beneath the tree runs in the family.