I have a peculiar history with Christmas trees.

My first memory of a fresh-cut tree is my sister Nancy standing on a chair reaching up to place the star on top. She leans too far forward and falls headfirst into the tree.While her tears ran over sappy pine needle scratches on her face, I can still hear my father yelling, "Look what you done now," while pointing to the broken branches on the floor.Remember when one light burned out, the whole set went dark? That was my job, too. Find and replace the bad boy while juggling the other hot bulbs from one hand to another.In our house, we did tinsel, not garland. Dad would throw handfuls from a foot away and the gobs of silver landed wherever. Then my mother took his mess off the tree and replaced the tinsel strand by strand until she tired of it. Then it was my turn to finish the last four boxes, strand by strand.Rather than buy brand-new boxes of the silver stuff for the following year, I had to remove the tinsel strand by strand and place it carefully back onto the cardboard sleeves.Years later, when I was on my own, a bunch of my buddies and I took a couple of vans to a Christmas tree farm in south Jersey.We wandered through the fields on a cold December afternoon slugging flasks of blackberry brandy. When we got back, we emptied 12 trees from the vans. Every one looked like a Charlie Brown Christmas tree. Our lady friends put a stop to our "Handy Brandy Tree Trip" the next year.For a while, I lived with Bruce, a good friend of mine. After we had decorated a real tree in his living room one Christmas season, I looked up at the ceiling and let out a shriek. Tons of tiny spiders that had been apparently hibernating in the tree were jumping out, energized by the heat from the lights.Though they were small, the glowing lights distorted their size and the shadows cast on the ceiling made the bugs look like huge tarantulas.Bruce freaked out. He climbed a ladder and emptied a can of bug spray into the tree. Three days later, we could still smell the spray as he swept another pile of dead spiders off the wrapped presents under the tree.Some years after that, I put up a huge tree that had a crooked trunk. During the night, I heard a crash followed by the sound of glass breaking. The tree had fallen. Broken ornaments littered the living room and the water I had just put into the stand had saturated the rug.After some fishing line was tied to curtain rods, the tree was up and back in business.When artificial trees first came out, they looked, well, they looked artificial. I bought one for my mother. Each limb was color-coded and fit into a matching colored hole in the plastic trunk. I figured my color blindness was going to be a problem, but it was my job to put the tree together.Two hours later my mother walked in the room. She grabbed her chest and nearly fell to the floor. The tree looked like a 6-foot sea monster with its green spindly arms reaching out, poised to grab the first unsuspecting person who walked by with a decoration in his hand.I dismantled the beast and put it together again, this time with my mother doing a branch-by-branch color check.A week passed. The hot colored lights had melted some of the plastic needles, scaring Mom so much that on Dec. 26, I tossed the fake fir away.I still favor real over artificial because each brings a different sort of character with it.And like a commercial that says, "A diamond is forever," so is a real Christmas tree. Even after you have dragged it through the door at the end of the season, the tree is never really gone.Seasons go by. You walk barefoot in the living room one day and a leftover pine needle gets stuck between your toes.Merry Christmas and happy pine needles to everyone!