While I did not attend the Macy's Holiday Parade (yes, they have one in Seattle as well as NYC) today, I did walk over to the Metropolitan Market and saw they had fresh small fir trees, in water no less. So I bought one and carried it home. On the way, a girl remarked 'one holiday to the next eh?' and I just laughed it off, but I should have explained, it's not that simple.
1) I'm not used to this idea of buying a tree without cutting it first - usually the first or second weekend of December the family, or later, Allison and I, would drive up to the mountains, find a tree, cut the tree, have a nice lunch at Our Daily Bread or Mellow Mushroom, get some candy from Mast general store, then head home. Which leads to...
2) I don't know what selection is like here - do fresh trees sell out and then you get brown dying trees, or is the fresh tree supply constantly replenished?
3) It's not like the tree will be an orgy of presents anyway - for one because it is about a meter and a half tall, the other because we'll be in Wisconsin for the week of Christmas, with family, who also cannot really give us presents, because we have to fly back. The actual holiday will be more about family and food, which is how it should be. We're mainly giving local foods as presents - to share some of the neat stuff that exists out here. And we'll probably get some Wisconsin made chocolates and Usinger's sausage in return.
4) The evergreen was just sorta adopted by Christmas anyway - it's a much older symbol of winter and the birth of the new year. From the Roman Saturnalia to the Yule celebrations of the Northern European peoples... it's just kinda what to put in your dwelling at this time of year, historically. There won't be little Disney or Biblical characters hanging from the tree or anything - just some lights, and a star on top.
In any case... I appeared to fulfill someone's stereotype, and even though it wasn't the case in reality, that annoyed me.
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