Fake trees are looking good: Christmas tree shopping put her to real test this year

Many things over the years have plummeted in quality. I’m looking at you, appliances. My parent’s Kenmore harvest gold washer and dryer outlived them. Meanwhile it’s a miraculous event worthy of a Ripley’s Believe it or Not! shout out if any of my appliances last a decade.

One thing, though, that has vastly improved in quality is the artificial Christmas tree. Back in the day those trees were more depressing than getting a fruitcake as your “big” present from your nana.

My fake tree coming of age was in the 1980s and those plastic PVC Fraser firs had all the charm of decorating a Tupperware container. It was a real two-for-one because you also got the off-gassing of the plastic providing an olfactory experience that didn’t smell like your traditional scents of the season. Somehow cinnamon, ginger and cloves with an overlay of vinyl chloride monomer wasn’t a sensory gift that most people’s nasal passages wanted to cherish.

But now artificial trees are putting real, birthed in the soil, raised in the sun evergreens to shame. Team fake tree has turbo charged its game with advancements like “true needle foliage” where each tree has 40 variations of Fraser fir branch tips.

There’s also needle matching where the trees feature a dozen different shades of green to replicate the “color story” of each branch. “Tip count” verification documents when someone solemnly swears that your tree has at least 6,000 tips, because the higher the tips the fuller the tree.

All of these artificial tree improvements caused the unthinkable to happen in my house. For the first time in my life, I was seriously considering faking it for Christmas. It’s not that I wanted an artificial tree, it was more like I was being wooed by my husband to give fake a chance.

The first thing I did was actually look at an artificial tree catalog. My immediate take away was that the “tip count” doesn’t come cheap — cha-ching — and that we, as a nation, are lacking the holiday spirit because these trees are pre-lit.

How can you even begin to experience the wonder of the season until you undertake the ordeal of spending a good six hours (crying not required but I’d plan for it) wrapping your tree in lights? If anyone is thinking six hours must be a typo, well, you’re wrong. It takes at least that to twine lights on each branch until you’ve created a tree that looks like it’s been lit by dainty fairies with gossamer wings.

My next adventure was to see some fake trees in person. They looked really good. I was impressed. But I still couldn’t shake my yearning desire for a fresh cut evergreen. This meant before I could fully embrace the fake tree life I needed to make a final visit to the land of the real tree.

Once I arrived I was engulfed in the scent of Christmas. As I walked down the aisle of noble firs I lovingly caressed the branches of each tree I passed while making a concerted effort to not look at the price tag.

After aggressively hugging a few Fraser firs and getting some curious stares from other shoppers, I confessed to my husband that I couldn’t go fake, at least not this year. Then, seconds later, as if I was getting a sign from a celestial gathering of evergreen angles, a divine light from the heavens shone down on the perfect tree for our family.

OK, so maybe that “divine light” was the result of my husband moving out of my way so I could see more trees, but as far as family lore is concerned I’m sticking to my divine light story.

Reach Sherry Kuehl at snarkyinthesuburbs@gmail.com, on Facebook at Snarky in the Suburbs, on Twitter at @snarkynsuburbs on Instagram @snarky.in.the.suburbs, and snarkyinthesuburbs.com.

This story was originally published December 7, 2022 at 6:30 AM with the headline "Fake trees are looking good: Christmas tree shopping put her to real test this year."