Real tree worthlosing sleep over

Now that the Christmas trees in Rockefeller Center and downtown Bangor are finally aglow, it won’t be long before the rest of us are lashing evergreens to our car roofs and hauling them home for the holidays.

Yet those of us who happily continue this cherished holiday tradition are clearly in the minority these days. According to a business story in yesterday’s paper, real Christmas trees have been steadily losing ground to their artificial counterparts for more than a decade now. In 1990, 35.4 million homes were adorned with real trees and 36.3 million displayed the fake variety. By 2000, however, the number of artificials had soared to more than 50 million, while real trees numbered only about 32 million. And the drop in popularity of real trees has continued in the past few years, lamented the National Christmas Tree Association, to only about 23 million last year.

America’s increasing fondness for ersatz evergreens, the story explained, has its roots in a company called the Addis Brush Co. It pioneered the production of fake trees sometime in the 1930s, using the same machinery it used to make, of all things, toilet bowl brushes.

That last bit of Christmas trivia rang a memory bell for me. Now, all these many years later, I finally know why the string of fake trees of my childhood was so terribly unsatisfying. Their limbs did indeed resemble an array of toilet brushes bristling from a pole, come to think of it.

Not that looks mattered to my father back then, bless his fretful heart. He was a cautious man who firmly believed that aesthetics must always take a back seat to safety where his family was concerned. And a real tree attached to a light socket was, to his way of thinking, the most cockeyed holiday notion ever conceived.

Whenever we kids complained that it was time we got a real Christmas tree, my father would roll his eyes as if to say, “What a great idea! Sure, let’s drag dead vegetation into the living room and hang electrical wires all over it and plug it in. Then maybe we can all spend Christmas Eve standing outside in the freezing cold in our pajamas and watching our nice new house burn to the ground. Sounds like fun.”

Consequently, several of my childhood Christmases were celebrated in a forest of phony fir. One year, when the colorful trees began appearing in windows throughout our suburban neighborhood, my father loaded us all into the station wagon and headed for Sears. In that vast emporium of American practicality, where we got everything back then, we bought a tree that came in a long, narrow box stamped with the words “Some assembly Required.”

At home, we jammed the glossy green boughs into holes in the “trunk,” bent the spindly arrangement into something that almost approximated a tree found in nature, and then stood back and eyed it suspiciously. The thing was so obviously fraudulent that it might have been made by a toilet-brush manufacturer. Now I know it probably was.

“Don’t worry,” my father said. “Once we get the decorations on you’ll think it’s a real tree.”

When that didn’t happen, we draped on enough tinsel until the tree shimmered like a sequined gown. Then we blasted it with canned snow until it had the look of a conical plaster cast. Not exactly a Currier & Ives creation, perhaps, but completely nonflammable.

Even indestructible plastic trees lose their “lifelike” appeal in time, so other artificials followed. One year, however, my father went a bit too far. He set

up an aluminum tree that was bathed that Christmas season in the garish, ever-changing colors beamed from a revolving plastic wheel – truly a tree for the Sputnik age.

We kids rebelled, and the next year our first real tree stood in the bay window. A lovely tree that did not get its balsam scent from a spray bottle. A tree that cost my father some sleep, no doubt.

I know that today’s artificial trees look deceptively real, and that the old toilet-brush motif is a thing of the distant past. But I’ve never once considered adorning my own living room with anything but the genuine article. Living as I do in the land of fir trees, an artificial has always seemed like a betrayal of Yankee tradition. This year will be no different.

Yet each night that it stands, I’ll hear my father’s voice urging me to check the water under the tree. After all, nothing ruins a family’s holiday spirit quicker than standing in the snow in your pajamas and watching the place burn down.