Real or Fake? The Eternal Debate

I say this every year, "I think we're going to get a fake Christmas tree next year". It's not that I really want a fake tree. "Embarrassing" is not the right word, but to me there is something about fake trees that admits defeat; like taking the easy route or the road most travelled. But there are certain things about real trees that are detracting from my overall satisfaction with the Christmas tree experience.

Our living room has a 20' ceiling, so we aim for a minimum tree height of nine feet. We also like noble firs because of their sturdy and more spaced branches. Apparently, some type of metamorphosis takes place during the period in which a noble grows from eight to nine feet in which the trunk doubles in size and the diameter improves by three feet or so. The nine footers are too much to handle. Last Christmas I had to trim the trunk vertically to remove some girth so that it could fit in my tree stand. The nine footers are too wide to fit through my door, whose frame moulding bears many scars from Christmas trees past. Besides that the nine footers are incredibly awkward to balance in the stand and carry into the house by myself (no help for Ducheznee. I'm growing some help, but he's not quite even one year old yet). A few years ago we started having the trees baled at the tree farm which helped quite a bit in the door scratching department. I could also hoist the trees onto my shoulder which made them easier to manage. 

The problems with baling, however, are many. When the string is released, a heavy shower of needles rains down onto the living room floor. Additionally, the weight shift can be so significant that the tree is no longer balanced in the stand. I long ago replaced the break-your-fingers hand-turn tightening screws in my stand with standard hex head carriage bolts so that I could quickly loosen and tighten them with my cordless drill. This was invention born out of necessity; necessity of sparing bruises on my fingers and scraping on my knuckles from the stock tightening screws.

The other MAJOR problem with baling is when it comes time to remove the tree. Like the slim fox that sneaks through a hole in the fence into the chicken pen to feast and finds he is too fat to escape via the same route, the unbaled Christmas tree can no longer pass through the doorway. I have to get my loppers and limb the tree inside the living room. Of course this makes another huge mess and means multiple trips between the living room and the burn pile where the Christmas tree will eventually embark on its journey to that great tree farm in the sky.

All of that I could live with. My wisdom and experience has led to satisfactory solutions. But the one aspect in which a real tree will never beat a modern artificial tree is lighting. I loathe putting the lights on the tree. Strings that worked fine a year prior suddenly do not light up. It takes hours to wrap the lights around each branch while trying to conceal the cord and get even coverage. I wind up with pitch stains on my hands and scratches on my arms. Worse still is taking the lights off of the tree. The don't ever come off in reverse of how I put them on just four weeks earlier. In wrapping the branches, I somehow am able to tie complex Boy Scout knots throughout the tree. 

A big, nine foot tree with 1,400 preinstalled lights, no needle shedding, no trunk the size of a redwood, no spiders living in it that will one-by-one relocate to our 20' ceiling, and no watering, all sound very appealing to me.

I think I have Sara sold on the idea. I just need to convince myself.

I love taking the girls out to pick out our tree at a muddy tree farm. I love their little rubber boots. I love putting them on my shoulders so they can see how tall the trees are. I love the smell of a real tree and the velvety-soft needles. 

I talked myself out of it for another year. We bought a pre-cut noble from a lot. It was maybe eight feet tall. It had a trunk the size of my ankle. It lost very few needles. It was not baled, but fit nicely through my door just the same. I could carry it with one hand and open the door myself with the other. Theoretically it should also exit the same way. It fit better in our room - we didn't have to rearrange furniture at all. Also, we have not seen a single spider on our ceiling. I still didn't like putting the lights on, but since the tree was smaller I didn't need quite as many strings, nor did it take as long.

If we do end up with a fake tree, I'm thinking we'll still go cut a smaller, real tree for the kids. That might allow for the best of both worlds. Then Madison could put on her colored lights on her own tree since she doesn't like our white ones.

I'm glad I don't have to decide this for another year.

Princess Renaissance

We were at a barbeque recently where a little girl showed up in a Cinderella dress. I've long been fascinated with the gradual, yet sudden, emergence of the Disney Princesses as a leading brand within the Disney empire. Like an old, dilapidated heirloom furniture piece, Disney has been able to dust off, clean up, repair and reintroduce many of their princesses as modern and hip. In conjunction with that, they have developed new princesses of the same mold to join forces with their predecessors and create the now familiar Disney Princesses. It's Voltron for little girls - and we've got the backpacks, coloring books and pajamas to prove it. It's to the point that the movies and merchandise has no real theme or story other than the fact that they include two or more princesses on a given product. 

Snow White was the first. Then came Cinderella and Aurora. Each of them had to stand on their own. In modern times, the new lineup saw the addition of Ariel, Belle, and Jasmine. It was all about the movie, the message. "Someday my prince will come." "A dream is a wish your heart makes." (Uh oh!) Don't pretend to be someone you're not. Miracles cease to be miracles at midnight local time. Love conquers all. A kiss from a stranger can raise the dead. Wait until the day AFTER the expiration date on the evil sorceress' curse before coming out of hiding. 

Then, some genius recognized the assets Disney already had. They didn't need to, and probably couldn't (see Mulan, Pocahontas) keep churning out new heroins with each successive animated feature. By packaging the top six princesses together, making them friends of each other, aligning their historical time lines, ages, and locations so that they can all exist in our present day, Disney has created a all-star team for girls. In the process, the new princesses have given face lifts to the original princesses and, in turn, the originals have provided instant street cred to the new ones. We are judged by who are friends are. Well, Jasmine's friends are Cinderella and Aurora, so Jasmine must be of pretty high caliber herself. Snow White hangs out with Hot Belle, so she must be sophisticated and modern, too. I would argue that the original princesses have earned their almost mythological celebrity by withstanding the test of time, but were fairly simple characters in their films. The new princesses are much more complex, but relied on the reputations of their fore bearers to quickly vault them into rock-star status.

It all comes down to merchandising. There are a few extreme people that obsess over a particular subject. People that collect everything with a cat on it, or Star Wars. There's a commercial running right now about a Pittsburgh Steeler fan with a room in his house where everything is Steeler-branded, except the table lamp. In the Disney realm there are a few people that collect Mickey Mouse stuff and flaunt it. I think in most cases we would view those people as outliers - not the norm.

But in the case of the Disney Princesses, Disney has positioned the brand as mainstream. They've made it acceptable and actually normal for every girl to obsess. Every other girl at Disneyland has a princess dress on. Entire shops and restaurants are exclusively devoted to them. There are series of DVD based on their collective star power. The nightly parade is designed around their popularity. New attractions, shows, and ice-capades are based on their joint stardom. There is even a closed circuit television channel at the resorts that runs all-princesses, all the time programming. There is also a "Dream Suite" contest where someone can win a night's stay inside a princess castle-like hotel suite inside of Disneyland (It is located directly above Pirates of the Caribbean.)

At our house we've got board games, toys, DVDs, storybooks, clothes, hats, shoes, pajamas, pillows, stickers, coloring books, chairs, jackets, jewelery, dolls, costumes, crowns, and wands, all with "Disney" and "Princess" marked somewhere on them. I'd really like to think that my girls aren't as odd as some of the other obsessive aggregators of themed items. Maybe they are and we're facilitating that behavior. 

At lease we already know and accept that we are suckers. We decided early on that we would allow this obsession as long as the girls were only cuckoo for one thing. We don't have Barbie or Care Bears or My Little Pony. We're exactly the kind of people Disney is looking for - chasing look-a-likes all over Disneyland for their signature instead of riding rides, paying Ariel's Grotto prices for lunch, watching the princess channel every waking hour even though it repeated the same 10 minute program all day long, and spending an entire half day standing in line at the Princess Faire all for the right to shop at the Princess Store.