So we went to buy a Christmas tree this weekend.

My girlfriend and I headed a block down the road to the nearest tree seller set up in a pharmacy parking lot. Because nothing says quality arboreal decorations like a trailer parked in the back of a Rite-Aid parking lot. We got down there to a small set-up of a few dozen trees that were, as near as I could tell, identical. I couldn’t tell you the difference between a white pine and a white spruce or a spruce pine or whatever else the other options are. Hell, I’m lucky to tell the difference between a deciduous and an evergreen. Meanwhile, my girlfriend was wondering through, debating between Canaan fir and a Douglas fir and a Scotch pine.

We selected our tree corpse and bought it with surprisingly little hubbub. The guys selling the trees, clearly baked off their asses, wrapped it up and we shoved the thing halfway out the car door. We hopped into the car and drove a block home. Yay!

Up the stairs and into the house to scare the ever-loving hell out of our cats with what would become their garnish for the next month. We re-organized the living room and set-up the tree in such a way that it will be in our way with everything we do. We re-organized a second time so it wasn’t quite as bad, and then proceeded to put off decorating for several days because we’d just affixed a tree-corpse into the middle of the house.

An odd thing to do, really. She’s pagan, I’m functionally an atheist, and we both are acutely aware how much the cats are going to chew on the tree and how much regurgitation we’re going to be looking at. But still, happy holidays, I suppose.