New Year, Invigorated Travel Agent!

My folks were artificial tree people, my Dad worked insanely long hours, working two jobs- so an outing to search for the perfect "real" tree just wasn't in the cards for us. We had LOADS of other really sweet holiday traditions that I remember fondly, but having a real, live, National Lampoon's Christmas tree was never one of them. (Which if we are using Chevy Chase as our measure of success, that's probably a blessing.)

When my husband and I were first married and living in our first, painfully small apartment we decided our first Christmas should be celebrated by buying a live tree. The trip to pick out the tree was fun, the smell of this new, live tree was magnificent and we felt decidedly VERY Hallmark Channel Christmas. However, when EVERY.SINGLE.NEEDLE systematically fell from that tree, hid in carpet fibers, and created an EPIC post-holiday disaster, we decided our real tree days were done. From then on, we would invest in the fullest, biggest, pre-lit and most fake tree...