Size Matters

Every year, I say I want a huge tree. Like the trees you usually only see in shopping malls. That kind of tree. Think Rockefeller Center. We have very high ceilings in the living room, so even an eight foot tree looks kind of small. Last year, after we already had our tree, Neil saw a tree lot in Del Mar selling really tall trees. But, we were short on time today, so we either had to get a tree from somewhere else, or wait almost two weeks. We went to one place and before we got out of the car, we could tell they didn't have our tree. Their trees looked like shrubs compared to my pine-y vision. At the second place, we did find huge trees. Gigantic trees with $300 price tags. I probably would have tried to convince Neil, but there was no way we could get a tree that big home.

So, I opted for symmetry, forgoing, yet again, my desire for a twelve foot-plus tree. We found a perfectly nice 9 foot grand fir, loaded it up, and headed home. As we turned on to our street, I immediately saw my neighbor (not just any neighbor, but the neighbor who washes all three cars every single week and whose garage is perfectly immaculate and who always has the Christmas lights up the day after Thanksgiving and who has a pool in the backyard) standing in his driveway with his blower, clearing his perfect driveway of the needles that had fallen from his glorious twenty foot tall tree.

I looked back at our tree, and said to Neil, "Don't even bring that thing in my house."