For a very long time, I was certain that fake Christmas trees were better all around than real ones. In my family, we were fond of quoting a Saturday Night Live sketch that encapsulated our worldview on the fake versus real debate: "In the spirit of Christmas, I killed a tree for you."
Somewhere along the line, that conviction has begun to waver. In Prague, we had real trees for the years we spent Christmas there, not wanting to have yet another fake tree in our possession since we were keeping one in storage in the United States. Chip really liked the real trees, and that's also what he grew up with. I felt torn about it and then increasingly irritated as the needles littered the living room, despite our ministrations. The crowning glory of our last real tree was a hugely tall spruce that came close to touching our turn-of-the-last-century ceilings and had to be decorated with a ladder. We got an extra sense of just how tall it was when the cats climbed it at about 12:30 Christmas night, pulling it over in a shower of needles and sap and ornaments and necessitating its midnight disposal.
All of which is a long way of saying that I'm still sold on the convenience factor of fake trees, especially now that some of them come pre-lighted. (Not ours.) What I'm not so clear on anymore is the environmental virtue of keeping a fake tree versus "killing" a live one. This article on Slate does a pretty good job of laying out the pros and cons, and the author ultimately comes down on the side of real trees as friendlier to the environment, mainly because of the disposal issue.
As our artificial Christmas tree reaches the decade marker, we are already thinking about next year and what we will do. Will we buy a new fake tree or take advantage of the numerous farmed real trees in this area? We're leaning toward the latter.
What's in your house this Christmas, if you're celebrating?