Team Real
When my brother and I were kids, he developed a mysterious allergy to balsam firs. Worse than the wheezing, in my opinion, was the remedy: an artificial Christmas tree. Gone was our family’s annual visit to the tree farm, where we’d clamor around the fluffiest, greenest specimen as if it were George Clooney. Instead, we trekked to Walmart and grudgingly selected the best-looking cardboard box. After 30 minutes of trimming that evoked all the wonder of assembling an Ikea coffee table, we had a “tree.” It didn’t look bad. But it felt wrong—counterfeit, like a hunk of PVC posing as nature, shipped across an ocean to mock us in our own living room. I missed the tiny, quaint delights that come with inviting a piece of the forest into one’s home: the soft pinch of pine needles, the sweet resin smell, the jolt of domestic accomplishment from watering the stump. I suspect something in my brother’s body did, too, because two winters later, his allergy dissipated just as randomly as it had appeared. That year at the Christmas-tree farm, my dad hitched a miracle to the roof of the car.
—Kate Corliss
Team Fake
At the age of two, I had a brutal asthma attack caused by a live Christmas tree, and it’s been fake trees for me ever since. That’s for the best. I hear you have to go out in the cold to purchase a real one, and vacuuming is also my least favorite chore. My current fake tree, acquired on a dreary late-fall day in 2019 when I desperately needed some cheer, is objectively awful. It’s the saddest 12-inch faux fir you ever saw; it’s scraggly and obviously plastic and conspicuously bare, with built-in multicolored lights that look oddly aggressive when they strobe. But it reminds me of the tree in A Charlie Brown Christmas, a scrawny sapling that the gang initially hates but comes around to in the end, because the holiday season—imagine this—isn’t actually about buying the nicest things. It’s about sharing joy with the people you love. Wheeling out this terrible little tree has become a beloved tradition in my house. The tree is funny and charming and it now carries the memories of a half dozen Christmases past. I love it. I’m attached to it. I’m never giving it up.
—Sylvie McNamara
This article appears in the December 2025 issue of Washingtonian.
