You Know When It’s Real -A Christmas Tree Story from Generation Y
There is No Close Second
I love the smell of evergreen. From the day my Dad and brother carry the tree into the house I know that the Christmas season has begun. This is the day that I wait for. If Christmas Day is the finish line to the season’s race then bringing home the Christmas tree is its starting gunshot. It is an intimate and nostalgic aroma that initiates the start of our Christmas traditions. I always anxiously await and welcome the crisp, clean evergreen smell into our home. Ever since I was a small child I was awarded the task of helping lay the twinkling lights around the pin-needled branches. Foregoing a bath, I would experience the fruits of my labor as I fell asleep that night still coated in the welcomed smell and stickiness of evergreen. I would sleep to find evergreen and subsequently Christmas to have permeated my subconsciousness and into my dreams. This is the most beautiful way to start the most beautiful of holidays.
To my dismay, I have found this precious piece of the Christmas season to be threatened. One Christmas when I was a young girl, my family and I found ourselves dressed in red and green, armed with gingerbread cookies and headed to a dear friend’s Christmas party. Upon walking through their front door I was hit with the absence of the most precious of all Christmas decorations – the smell of evergreen. I was confused because I saw the tree but I couldn’t smell the aroma that always greeted me as I entered a home in December. Our hosts had bought a fake tree that season. I was dumbfounded – this was the first time I was introduced to the idea that people choose to opt out of enjoying this part – and as far as I was concerned an absolute necessity – of Christmas. They named their fake tree “Spruce” – the “tree” that would become merely an impersonal thing to retrieve from a storage space, the “tree” that their family would not wait for in anticipation to begin their Christmas traditions, the “tree” that would find that the closest it would ever be to a real evergreen tree is that it was named after one. To this day the beautiful home and the graciousness of our hosts – the things I should remember – were overshadowed by a sense of the emptiness brought about through the artificial. There is no close second to the real thing.
-Meagan Holder (Age 22)