Call me a fake, a fraud and a sham, but this year I did something that I swore, when I was a little girl, I would never do. I bought an artificial Christmas tree.

Every year when I was a child, my mother would haul our fake tree out of storage on the day after Thanksgiving and we would decorate it for the season. She claimed it was her penchant for putting the tree up so early that inspired her preference for faux foliage — and I'll admit that vacuuming up pine needles for a month and a half is no picnic – but I always had my suspicions that the real reason was more financially motivated.

For our tree, you see, was not only fake, it was fake-looking, which I'm sure had something to do with the fact that it was — hmm … how to put this delicately? — cheap and crappy.

Before I offend the seasonal purists out there, let me say that I wholeheartedly aver that the holiday season shouldn't be about material things or outdoing your neighbors with the presents and the decorations; it should be about peace and goodwill and family togetherness, pa-rum-pa-pum-pum. But let me also state for the record my personal belief that when your ratty, balding Christmas tree can't even fool the half-blind, incontinent family dog into thinking it was once a living thing, it may be time to upgrade.

In any case, my disappointment with the family Christmas tree translated into a disdain for artificial trees as a whole, and during my first holiday in my own apartment, after schlepping a $20 Scotch pine home from my local Tom Thumb, I breathed in its pungent smell and proudly proclaimed, "That's more like it."

And so it was for the next several years. Each tiny apartment was outfitted with an inexpensive — but real — tree from the grocery store, and each year, even as I clogged my vacuum with gobs of pine needles and spent precious holiday time picking sap from my carpet, I felt confident that the real tree was still the way to go.

Flash forward to two years ago. After a long spate of treeless holiday seasons, my beloved and I decided it was time to plant a pine in our living room. It was our first Christmas in our new house, which seemed a fine reason to break out the tinsel and ornaments. But after setting out on a crisp December afternoon to find the perfect tree, we made a startling discovery: The $20 trees from the grocery store just didn't cut it anymore.

Because of the proportions of our living room, we needed a taller, fuller tree than those we came across at any of the budget lots. So we headed to our neighborhood nursery, where we found an array of lovely fir and spruce varieties … and prices that started at $75 and quickly moved north.

Ah, but Christmas comes but once a year, so after an hour and a half of carefully weighing our options, we strapped an 8-foot Fraser fir to the top of the car and, after parting ways with about a hundred bucks, we made our merry way home.

And that's when the real fun began.

It took another hour of sawing and wrestling with the tree stand before our Christmas bounty was ready to be taken inside, at which point we enjoyed a good 45 minutes of turning, twisting and adjusting, trying to find the tree's "good side." (For $100, you would think it should have more good sides than Brad Pitt, but I digress.)

Finally, it was time to start the decorating process, which is when I made another startling discovery. My husband, the least decor-obsessed man on the planet, had some definite ideas about the proper placement and positioning of lights. And his ideas seemed to conflict heavily with my laissez-faire, string-'em-up-and-be-done-with-it approach.

Because I didn't carefully wrap each branch with lights in a manner to suit him, the job of lighting the tree fell to my husband. And because he doesn't like to be rushed when working on such an exacting task, it took two full weeks of his sporadic futzing with the lights before we were ready to hang our first ornament.

Needless to say, this did not fill me with the holiday spirit.

This year, when it was decided that we would again be spending Christmas at home and so would need a tree under which to unwrap our seasonal booty, I made a momentous decision. Rather than shelling out a hundred bucks for a beautiful but impractical tree that would shed needles and sap on our new hardwood floors before being unceremoniously hauled out to the curb, I opted for a beautiful but synthetic blue spruce with a 15-year warranty and 1,500 lights already permanently affixed to its bushy, non-needle-dropping boughs.

It took my husband less than a half-hour to unpack it and set it up; after little more than an hour of unfolding and arranging the branches just so, it was time to hang the ornaments. By the time the afternoon was over, we were sitting cozily on the couch sipping cocoa and admiring our handiwork.

"Doesn't it look pretty?" I asked. "And it was so much easier than last time."

Ever the hard sell, my husband cocked his head and studied the tree critically for several moments before murmuring that it "looked pretty good for a fake." He sighed, then sat back.

"I know it's probably more practical to have an artificial tree," he said, "but it still just feels like there's something missing."

As much as I hated to admit it, he was right. Which is why this weekend, as I burn the half-dozen pine-scented candles I've placed strategically throughout the house, my beloved will be taking apart the vacuum cleaner to remove the carefully constructed ball of purloined pine needles I placed there as a very special holiday surprise.

Every other week, Say-so brings random musings and commentary on popular culture to Break Room.
E-mail Kim Harwell