O Christmas Tree?

Usually when we pick out our Christmas tree, it pretty much follows the same pattern. Sean picks out one way too big, I pick out one way too small, and we repeat this game of extremes through six tree lot tents until the kids feel like impaling themselves on a pine bough just to go home.

Not this year.

Today, as I was looking at the juniper bush size trees checking needle pressure and trunk straightness, Sean and the kids all went for the single largest tree in the tent. It was a mammoth tree--so ridiculously large that Rockefeller Center probably rejected it because it was just too big. Stevie stood next to it and could only reach the bottom tier of branches. I thought I can hear the Swiss Family Robinson yodeling somewhere near the top.

It was pricey too, this here tree. Double what I thought was expensive. But instead of traveling 4.6 miles to the next identical tent with the identical over-priced over-sized trees, we just did it. Bought the biggest, baddest, most crooked, expensive tree in the county and put it in our living room. And bedroom and kitchen, but sometimes you just need a little a whole heaping lot of Christmas right this very minute.



Even though we don't have even a fraction of ornaments or lights to decorate this Yule Log hopped up on Miracle Gro, the house whole--as well as the whole block--smells of pine and the unexpected.

And Santa can not only leave a whole lot of presents, he can park his sleigh underneath, string up a hammock from the lowest boughs and take a siesta on Christmas night.