By Malia Carden | Leave A Comment
Well, maybe I’m being a bit melodramatic with the whole “saved” my marriage part but it definitely helped a great deal!
Our first Christmas as a married couple we were still college students and barely surviving paycheck to paycheck. Some friends purchased a real tree that year and got a coupon for a $10 tree that they passed on to us. We were thrilled to get be getting a real tree! But as it turns out, you get what you pay for.
That’s not the tree we had but it’s pretty close. Not only was the tree ugly but we had numerous problems fitting it into our tiny apartment and getting it to stay upright! It was a mess and one fateful evening, before Christmas, I gently asked my new husband to, “GET THAT THING OUT OF HERE RIGHT NOW!”
Unfortunately, our learning curve in this area was a bit flat. We tried again the next year and the year after that to have real Christmas trees. They were not as ugly as the first one but we still encountered many obstacles that had us at each others throats.
We eventually called a moratorium on real Christmas trees and agreed that someday, when we had a house of our own, we would get a nice, full sized, artificial tree!
We bought our first house in 2002 and ever since then we have had an artificial tree. We even upgraded to a pre-lit one two years ago and that has been a sanity saver as well as a relationship saver!
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What kind of Christmas tree do you like?
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Did you have to compromise when you got married?
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Have you had any Christmas tree mishaps?
Photo credits: UglyChristmasTrees.com, g-hat, zerobug
ABOUT Malia Carden
New media enthusiast, inconsistent blogger, One2One Network Community Manager & Blog Editor, imp{read more}
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We always get a real tree. My hubby was the one who compromised. He was used to artificial, then he married me. Now he loves traipsing through the fields, picking the perfect tree, cutting it down with our boys, and all the tradition and sentimentality that goes with it.
I laughed so hard when I saw this post!! My husband and I have gone for 14 years to cut down our Christmas tree at the same tree farm. Each year we are in search of the perfect tree, and each year we find one. One year we cut down “the perfect” tree-it was fat and full-just gorgeous!! Our first sign of trouble should have been when the worker could barely lift it. Our second clue should have been when the trunk hung off of the back of my car. Boy when we cut the twine off of that tree I heard a ping and the branches came flying down (a la Clark Griswold). It was the biggest tree I had EVER seen!! It took up our entire living room-oh my gosh we still laugh about that!!!
Needless to say our home was very fragrant and very green!! What a wonderful memory:)
Oh this gives me a chuckle… I grew up gathering the real thing and it is just part of the whole Christmas thing! My husband grew up with an artificial tree and has no idea why you even need a tree to celebrate Christmas!!! And after fifteen years we still still resolve this pretty much every Christmas Eve… and Boxing day it seems – ell, less important!
We’ve had fake trees in previous years. This year, we don’t have one because we won’t be at our apartment for Christmas morning and our cat would eat it…
WOW. I could never have a fake Christmas tree. I LOVE the mishaps and the funky looking scrawny trees. One year we even tied it to the wall with clear fishing line because it wouldn’t stay upright by itself. It is Christmas to me to have the mishaps. Real trees aren’t perfect and Celebrating Christmas shouldn’t be either. To each their own I guess but I feel sad that you couldn’t find a tree worthy of being a Christmas tree.
I absolutely LOVE it when we learn lessons in the most unexpected things.
Who would have thought that we could be taught through a tree.
(and by the way – we love our artificial tree; we’ve had the real thing many times and I think it’s highly overrated! lol)
xo~K