A few years ago, I surprised even myself and bought a "fake" Christmas tree. I had always felt a little bit guilty knowing that a perfectly good tree had been cut down just for our holiday pleasure but it was the annual hassle of it that made me finally give it up and I haven't regretted it once. No matter what we did the tree always got terribly dry and I worried about a fire and how to keep the animals from drinking the water in the basin and keeping the needles vacuumed up and then having to put the lights on and taking them off and the question of how to get rid of the tree...it makes me stressed just thinking about it! Well, I fell in love with this white pre-lit wire tree in the Martha Stewart Christmas section of Kmart one year. It's in four pieces that you stack one into the other and then just plug it in! I hate to think that it is a fake Christmas tree so I told the kids that we are going to call it a Memory Tree. Afterall, the majority of our ornaments are some sort of memory: places we have visited, first Christmas', children's handprints, collars of beloved pets who have passed away, the last boppy's (pacifiers), ornaments that we have made from Christmas' past and ornaments from my childhood. It has a magical fairy type quality to it that the kids and I love and that along with the simplicity of the set up makes it the perfect tree for us.
