Editorial: One tradition gives way to another

Editor's note: This Christmas Eve we're taking a break from the pressing issues of the day to bring you a column from one of our favorite writers, the Star Tribune's James Lileks. Enjoy, and have a Merry Christmas.

We bought a fake tree this year. Yes, yes, we've betrayed the old hallowed ways of our forebearers. If we were real Minnesotans, we would tromp into the woods with an axe, find a tree that had been waiting for us all its life. With sure steady blows I would fell it, load it on the sled, and haul it to the car -- no, the sleigh -- and take it home, where children in nightgowns would be stringing popcorn and making sugarplums, whatever those are. Then we would festoon it with candles, eat krumkakke, read from the Good Book, and end the night in the old-fashioned way: standing on the lawn watching the house burn because one of the candles caught the tree on fire. It's a tradition. But traditions change. Gradually they yield, they morph, and the new becomes the old. From now on the tradition will be Assembly Night.

Putting it together you feel what someone in the future will experience during the first few years of Build Your Own Lifelike Mate kits; a bit abashed that you've resorted to the synthetic, but privately pleased at how easy this is. No more did I have to drag the corpse up the stairs, adjust the buttresses in the stand while my wife decried its crooked posture. At best, you had a zombie standing in your living room when it was over; at worst, it expired of shock and despair soon after you got it home, and would dump a hundred needles if the dog thumped his tail on the floor. The mess was the reason we went for the ersatz -- even after I'd stuffed the tree into its shroud, it always managed to fire off a billion needles on the way to the morgue slab of a January boulevard. We found needles in July.

Even so, this seemed too easy. The limbs were hinged, with wires for bones; all you had to do was clap your hands, and the limbs deployed to a perfect conical shape. It was pre-wired and pre-lit, so you're spared the annual task of untangling the spiky bolus of lights. It doesn't have a piny scent, but that comes in candle and spray form these days -- and I've never had a real tree that didn't exhaust its desire to perfume the room after a day or two. Once up, it was perfect. Symmetrical. Flawless. The Stepford Tree? Perhaps. Old photos of Xmases past show trees in all shapes, from bare, crooked Charlie Brown trees to crazy firs as wild as Einstein's hair. As with most things, we've become accustomed to the ideal of perfection, and we expect it. If we get a real tree home only to find it has a gap, we turn it to the corner, like a family secret. Was this perfect tree so different?

Of course not. Thank the decorations. There's a story behind each one, of course. Ah, I remember where we got this one: Macy's, in Virginia, by the Pentagon, with the lead pipe, in the Conservatory. Every year a few more end up in the box of Castoff Ornaments -- you see a herd of wide-eyed My Little Ponys and remember the year your daughter was thrilled to help decorate, and the Ponys were all bunched together about three feet off the ground. Not this year, she says: baby stuff. My Star Trek spacecraft: not this year. Dork stuff. But they light up and Spock says Happy Holidays, hon! No.

Every year it's the same; every year it's different. Nothing is ever where it was the last time around, but it's still our tree, and I'd pick out its decorative congerie from a hundred others. Doesn't mean it's predictable. This year, for example, my daughter has a tiny ornament of the Abominable Snowman giving a present to an ornament of Hello Kitty. Next year the Bumble might be gifting Mickey. The year after that he might be offering a present to the Enterprise NCC 1701-D. But they'll all be together, and that's what counts -- to end with the sort of Christmas cliché impervious to cynical dissection. That is what counts. We chose these things, and hung them together.

No, it's not a real tree, but who cares? It's not the love the tree brings to you. It's the love you bring to the tree. Ah, but where to store it in the off season? Simple. I'll just dig a small hole and stick it in the backyard next to the other evergreens. We'll bring it in on a sled. Every new tradition needs a bit of the old.