The Magic of Holiday Plastic

I am a complete believer in real Christmas Trees. As soon as you smell one you are instantly like, "damn, now that's frickin' Christmas" (I don't know why you swear so much). My grandfather had the ability to argue a $100 Christmas tree down to $15. That's my grandfather on my father's side. My grandparents on my mother's side had a fake tree. It was a nice little tree, at one point that is. Not by the time I was old enough to remember.

For some reason that I will never understand, every year my grandmother would take the tree out of the box, put it together and (and this is the unusual part in case you don't pick up on in) she would cut the tree to make it symmetrical. As far as I can tell, and please correct me if I'm wrong. but plastic does not grow. I mean, I've heard about a lot of advancement in plastics. But I don't think my grandparents had space age technology put in their Christmas tree. So each year the tree got smaller and smaller.

I once introduced the concept of labeling each branch so she would never have to cut it again but I was a child. I figured there was something that i just didn't understand. Now, 25 years later, I still don't understand.