THE BORN LESAR

I'm afraid I've become part of the artificial army

I did something this week that I vowed I never would. Whoa, no, I did not cheer for the Minnesota Vikings. Not that. Do you think I have no shred of decency or pride left?

Don't answer that. What I did do, though, was buy an artifi cial Christmas tree, which to me violates the essence of the holiday like having Santa Claus' sleigh pulled by a helicopter or baking gingerbread men out of pre-packaged dough. It's wrong, I admit it, I accept responsibility, but there just comes a time in life when a guy's gotta say, 'That's it. I give in. I can't handle the pressure anymore.' Call me a wuss. Go ahead. You've called me worse. Just last week, to your grandmother, from what I hear.

So I was always a real Christmas tree kinda guy, blue spruce, Frasier fir, Norway pine, I didn't care, just so it smelled like an evergreen car air freshener in my living room. When I was a kid, my Mom would put up a big 'ol long-needled pine that reached so high that the blonde angel she'd skewer on the very top had to squat so she didn't bang her halo on the ceiling. Then she'd hang dozens of glistening ornaments, string it with enough colored bulbs to light up rural Willard like downtown Chicago, and then cover it all up with a silver tinsel layer thicker than a polar bear hide. Hate to say it, but the dang tree looked like a 7-foot Cousin It from The Addams Family by the time she was done.

Go ahead. Google it. I'll wait. After I moved out from the family home and became my own man -- Hey, lots of guys wait until their 40s to get their own pad -- I continued with the tradition of buying only real Christmas trees. When I was married, me and the wife would go to a certain tree lot that her family visited when she was young, and we'd pick out a medium-sized conifer and decorate it with all the cute artsy-fartsy things the kids had made in grade school. No, it wasn't high class, but it was ours. And it made the whole house smell nice in the weeks after Christmas when I'd chop it up and shove it in the woodstove.

Later on, in my post-marital days, I continued to get a tree each year, most often from a commercial lot. That was the first sign I was getting lazy, as it had now become so much easier to go to a grocery store parking lot and have a guy load it up for me than it was to go to a tree farm, bend down to cut one myself, drag it back to civilization, and so forth. It was getting to the point where I was almost ready to just buy a spruce-scented Yankee Candle and be done with it. Or Arctic Vanilla Caramel. Those are nice, too.

And then my youngest son moved out. That was it for me, no more tree at all, for several years. I wasn't inspired to get one for myself, and the thought of finding and untangling lights, watering the thing twice every day, and then vacuuming dried needles out of the carpet until July just didn't appeal. A little Scroogishness mixed in there, too? Sure. Why not? They're too materialistic in Whoville anyway, I've always thought.

As it turns out, this year I live in a new place, and it's got a great big window through which a Christmas tree would look fabulous, or so I've been told. Caving to the peer pressure (you're right, I am a wuss), I decided I'd break my treeless streak and get one again. But not a real one this time, most likely 'cuz I've got steep stairs now and the thought of wrestling an 8-footer through a narrow hallway was about as appealing as getting a mandatory bosomy holiday hug from my great-aunt when I was 11. Ugh. I still have nightmares.

So Saturday evening I went tree shopping, not in an outdoor setting, mind you, but in a home goods store where they had maybe 30 models on display. There were 4-foot plastic versions that would have made Charlie Brown's skinny tree look robust, 6-foot long needled frosted options that cost considerably more than my first car (a dark green 1974 Ford Pinto, for reference's sake), and plush pre-lit 8-footers with pine cones and fake cardinals already attached. There was a purple variety, a hot-pink/silver number, white-flocked firs, blinking balsams and fully-decorated, pre-lit pop-ups that say 'Merry Christmas' about as well as an inflatable Nativity scene blown up by a generator on your front lawn. Hey, could somebody get out there with another cement block? Looks like the Mary and the Third Wise Man might blow away.

And the names, my, so Christmassy. There was the Snowy Avalanche, the Enchanted Forest, the Bedford Pine, the Laguna Pine, The Woodhaven Pine, and the 10-foot Vickerman, which, at $1,604.39 with 3,450 white and blue sprinkle lights, could substitute as the O'Hare International Airport main runway beacon. I was sort of pulled to a pudgy little tree with fiber optic lights, but it just seemed to me that it may be a government trap to spy on me and report my activities to the FBI. You can't be too careful with that nowadays.

After much internal debate (OK, maybe as long as 8 seconds), I chose -- believe it or not -- a fully frocked 6-footer that I believe will glow rather handsomely with the blue and purple lights I plan to hang upon its plastic branches. I like that combination, blue and purple -- sorta like a good bruise -- and upon thine limbs of my new alabaster yuletide symbol I will hang my holiday hopes, until maybe Dec. 27, when I'll take it apart and cram it back in the box and forget where I put it for next year.

I'm sure the thing I'll miss most about not having a real tree is the aroma, but since I caught COVID last year, I can't smell much of anything anyway. Turns out, I probably couldn't tell the difference between the scent of a pine or a dead chipmunk stuck in the branches, so I might as well just go fake. And besides, by buying an artificial tree, I'm saving one more real one to survive in nature and provide habitat for wildlife. Or get thrown in a shredder and ground up for mulch because it didn't get sold. That's nice, too.