When we lived in Los Angeles, my wife and I put up an artificial tree each year. But each year, like a bad houseguest, the tree gathered more dust, shed more needles, and sucked more joy out of the air. That's why, when we moved here to Pennsylvania, we left the disassembled fake tree in the basement and went with a real live Christmas tree each December. (And, of course, by "live" I mean a tree we killed.)

Until this year. We woke up Saturday morning, went through the usual panic of getting kids to karate and Girl Scouts and who knows what else -- I really only pay attention if I have to drive the kid there myself -- and realized, halfway through the day, that we needed to get a Christmas tree. Now. Every other weekend day is booked solid for the rest of the month.

The busy schedule isn't the only complication. This year we're also replacing the picture window that the tree traditionally sits in front of. So whatever tree we set up would have to be moved at some point. So, for the first time in memory, it made a lot of sense to go with the fake tree.

To us, anyway.

Our youngest daughter, Annie, protested vigorously. Every Christmas season she can remember began with us driving to a local Christmas-tree farm, picking one out, strapping it to the roof of the minivan, driving it home, setting it up, and then fighting over who got to put which decorations where. We promised her that we'd still fight over decorations for an artificial tree, but she wasn't listening. If we didn't kill a real tree, it just wasn't Christmas in her mind.

You know how this story ends: We packed the kids into the minivan, drove to the lot, and picked out a live -- which is to say, nearly dead -- tree. I strapped it to the roof rack, and we took it home.

Except it doesn't really end there. For reasons I can only attribute to advancing age and declining judgment, I picked a larger than usual tree. I remembered last year's tree as kind of wimpy. Not exactly a Charlie Brown tree, but not one that seemed entirely worth the trouble of killing and fighting over decorations. This year's tree, it turned out, was too big for our existing stand.

I forgot to mention that it had started snowing while we were at the tree-killing farm. It had seemed charming at the time. Two hours later, while I was slip-sliding my way to Wal-Mart to buy a new stand, the charm had mostly dissipated, and I had moved on to white-knuckled terror. Wal-Mart, unfortunately, was sold out of Christmas-tree stands. As was the Home Depot several miles away. By then, the roads were too treacherous to risk an even longer drive to the main shopping area here in Allentown.

So now I have a dying tree sprawled on my living-room floor, next to the strings of lights that Kimberly and the kids had wrestled with while I was out hunting for the suddenly elusive Christmas-tree stand. That makes today my version of Black Friday: I'll have to pick a local hardware store I think is most likely to have tree stands in stock, and make sure I'm the first one in the doors when it opens.

All for a tree Kimberly and I didn't really want in the first place.

The things we do for our kids!

Tags: christmas , family , personal