December 2011. Let it snow. Let it snow. Let it snow. Or as close as we can fake it in the South.

As the holidays settle like fog, I see my future: choosing a costly (almost) live fir tree with delicious scents and sentiments; decorating it to the pitter patter of falling needles; wrapping it in fiendish light strings that form a Gordian knot that will defy untangling when the lights come off; hauling water so my tree stays “fresh,” then realizing it refuses to drink and sits in a puddle of stagnant water as branch tips turn beige; finally stripping off ornaments with battle-scarred hands; shoving my bedraggled tree out the door; and dragging it bump, bump, bump down the steps and to curbside where it’s picked up for recycling as mulch. Then I collapse into a heap.

Some friends using artificial trees smirk sanctimoniously and say they’ve “gone green” and won’t support deforestation. Others cite allergies to conifers and smugly list reasons why they’re relieved not to deal with the drama. I just can’t do it. I want a fragrant tree grown in soil on a nice little tree farm, since I no longer live in the country where plentiful trees in the woods waited for my papa, my sister and me to choose them as holiday centerpieces. I can’t bear the perfection of artificial trees but fall helplessly in love with those slightly deformed that defy symmetry like childhood Christmas trees that grew in sunshine and rainfall, shaped by nature. Just look at me! I’m an atavistic idiot in the midst of artificial convenience.

In spite of me and my ilk, artificial Christmas stuff is embedded in American holidays though the original artificiality wasn’t an American innovation. We owe the tradition of both freshly cut trees and their artificial clones to Germany, where local markets in the 1550s sold cut fir trees for the holiday. When the tradition was axed in the 1800s due to severe deforestation (caused not by holiday tree cutting but by man’s drive to civilize the wilderness), table-top trees made of dyed green goose and swan feathers wired onto sticks stuck into holes in a larger stick—the “trunk”—solved the arboreal dilemma.

America had plenty of virgin forests to plunder, but when the 1913 Sears catalog offered feathery imports, we wanted them. Artificial trees took root. An earlier American faux tree was erected in 1747 by the German Moravian Church in Bethlehem (ahem), Pennsylvania, but wooden pyramids painted green and candle lit like that one didn’t tickle hearts as feathers did. By the 1920s, imported feather trees were de rigueur, but lo! a homegrown version appeared in 1930. The Addis Brush Company, producer of toilet brushes, had an Epiphany: brush-making equipment could also make twisted wire branches embellished with pig bristles for sturdier, less flammable trees. Soon Americans merrily put their gifts beneath toilet-brushed trees, fa la la. In the fifties and sixties, we went glitzy with a patented silver pine of highly flammable aluminum coated paper lit by a revolving spotlight of changing colors. We’ve progressed (?) to upside down trees bolted to the ceiling and fiber optic trees composed entirely of light. Today’s most popular artificial trees, imported from China, are made of PVC plastic, a non-renewable, not recyclable plastic that’s fire retardant, but not fire resistant. Caveat: older imported PVC trees often contain lead contaminants, which can scatter toxic dust as opposed to elfin dust.

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