Lee Geiger

Never worry about the size of your Christmas Tree. In the eyes of children, they are all thirty feet tall.

Larry Wilde

I love our Christmas tree. It commands our living room, and brews as much holiday warmth as Burl Ives extolling the virtues of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Nothing says Merry Christmas to me more than sitting on our cozy sofa next to a roaring fire, admiring the festive holiday shrub while enjoying a delicious glass of Napa’s finest.

The fact that both the tree and fire are as fake as a Chinese Rolex is irrelevant.

For years, the Geiger family tradition was to go out to dinner on a school night and then proceed to Bob’s Christmas Tree Lot, where I would plop down a hundred bucks for eight feet of yuletide evergreen. It smelled nice and all, but I spent much of the next year finding needles in places that shouldn’t have needles. But the very second my kids left the nest, I went all-in on a Balsam Hill super-duper-deluxe artificial tree, a three-easy-pieces miracle of modern science that takes all of sixty seconds to assemble. And the lights, already on the tree, went on as soon as I stepped on a button, enabling me to not have to bend myself in half just to plug them into the socket. Hallelujah!!!

Speaking of Christmas lights, I’m a steady, white sparkly light kind of guy. That blinking, colored bulb stuff just doesn’t work for me. And tinsel hanging from the tree doesn’t fly either, because as I kid those silvery strands were as carcinogenic as they were pretty to look at. And they didn’t taste too good, neither.

That leaves the ornaments, which is where the fun really begins. Thanks to an annoyingly stubborn yet wonderfully concerted effort by The Pretty Blonde, a.k.a. “MOM,” to buy a Christmas bulb at every tourist trap we ever vacationed at, we have ornaments from all over the world, providing cute, decorative family reminders of the places we’ve been, the things we’ve seen, the memories we made. Not to mention all the charming ornaments depicting each aspect of our lives, from the sports teams we cheer for, the hobbies we like to pursue, and the events and places in our lives that made each of us who we are.

When you get right down to it, a Christmas tree is like a museum, and the dainty, fragile ornaments are the collection of artwork you use to fill it up. That’s why, when I’m in the mood for some George Winston on the stereo and a glass of chardonnay in my hand, I like to walk around the tree and admire the shiny collection of memories that help bring the spirit and meaning of Christmas to my heart.

Merry Christmas,

Lee Geiger, The Marginal Prophet