I held out as long as I could but I finally gave in and went to the dark side…at least that’s the way my daughters see it…because I bought an artificial Christmas tree.

In the past several years as the quality of a Tannenbaum in a box has gotten better, getting an artificial tree became and more and more tempting. It was harder to justify the work that goes into buying and decorating a real tree. There’s the hassle of manhandling it into the car, dragging it in the house, adjusting it in the stand – “Is it straight now?” – and vacuuming up pine needles until Easter. But our daughters insisted that an authentic Christmas celebration required and authentic tree.

Even though this whole process was a lot of work, I could always wrangle one of the kids to help out. Especially our youngest daughter – Jennifer really cared about having a real tree and was willing to invest the time to make it happen.

Early in the holiday season, the two of us would plan an evening that we could shoot up to Costco and get the tree. While buying a tree at Costco isn’t quite an “over the river and through the woods” kind of picturesque outing, it was a bonding time for us. She always wanted me to wait to decorate the tree until she could be around to help. As we unwrapped each ornament, we reminisced about the moment in time when we bought them.

But this Christmas, Jennifer is in Shanghai and she definitely won’t be popping in for the holidays. And neither will our other two kids. Valerie is working most of the Thanksgiving weekend and Ethan has only been at his new post in Kansas for a couple of months.

So there’s no chance I’ll be letting anyone down by assembling and fluffing the artificial Douglas fir that I bought from Target.

I think the switch to an artificial tree is symbolic of a bigger change than just choosing to make decorating and cleanup from the holiday season a little easier for myself. The artificial tree represents a change of seasons in our lives. For so many years, the holidays were about making the holidays meaningful to the kids. But that time has passed. Now, it’s up to Steve and me to set the agenda for the holidays.

It’s a both uncomfortable and freeing. It will take some getting used to but we may actually rediscover what life was like BK…before kids.

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