Real versus fake: Is the traditional Christmas tree just plain boring?

Christmas … ’tis the season to embrace the bling. While Halloween is all dark and Goth, and Valentine’s Day is about passion and red, the Yuletide is the time of year when you can really go batshit crazy with the tinsel.

Until last year my family always had a real Christmas tree. When I was child, it was a casuarina (or scrub oak) chopped down from a National Park and dragged kicking and screaming back to the house, where it was unceremoniously displayed in a garbage bin adorned in wrapping paper.

Then, when the National Parks people began to take a dim view of removing habitat from their forests, we started having to buy our trees from charities such as the Lions Club. Not meaning to disparage such a fine institution as the Lions Club – a group that exists to ensure every suburban town has a park with a dodgy slippery slide – but their trees just don’t do it for me.

Usually they are flat on one side after being transported in the back of someone’s Toyota Hilux (on the plus, side, the flat side fits snuggly against the wall). And by Christmas Day they are either a flaccid embarrassment or a pile of pine needles on the living room carpet.

But worst of all they are green. In the pantheon of colours, green is just plain boring. If beige is the chartered accountant of colours, green is the quantity surveyor.

And the one thing Christmas should never be, is boring.

Christmas is the time of huge family rifts, slanderous gossip, office affairs, gluttony and wild inebriation. Which means it’s the one season that really deserves to be celebrated in style. Not with a boring bloody green tree bought from the front of a supermarket.

The answer is to do what our family did last year; find the most outrageously over-the-top fake tree in existence. The one we chose is made from gold tinsel and wonderfully camp. Matter of fact, we’ve nicknamed it Bert (after Bert Newton).

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Best of all, we bought the tree online and the shop we bought it from stuffed up and delivered us two by mistake. So, we were able to spread the Christmas spirit and give one to our mate Ben who is also embracing his inner Carlotta.

Anyway, we love our gold tree. We’ve decorated it with real Czechoslovakian crystals, and teal feather boas, so it looks like Liberace before a screaming rendition of Hello Dolly. Christmas morning just feels more special because of our tree. Even opening a present as daggy as a pair of designer kitchen scissors (thanks to my long-term partner) takes on a sense of occasion when it’s done beneath the gilded branches.

And the children, being like squawking magpies, love anything shiny, so the tree fills them with wonder. It has also led them to the delusion that as owners of a golden tree their parents must be filthy rich and successful. It’s kind of nice, having your kids believe you’ve actually made something of your life. 

But not everyone is as enamoured by Bert as we are.

Some folks just can’t understand how we can wake up to Christmas morning without that fresh pine smell (obviously, these people have never heard of Glen 20). However, we’ve been to these people’s homes and seen their tired foliage pushed flat against the living room wall. We’ve seen the same old joyless decorations, hung carelessly from drab limp limbs; the plastic angel at the top with the broken halo.

These are the same people who once bought us a goat for Christmas. Well, that’s what the card said. What they had actually done is bought somebody else a damn goat and we got bugger all. Last year they bought us a nativity scene woven by Guatemalans.

One thing Christmas isn’t about is charity. You can do that the other 364 days of the year.

Anyway, we’ve gone straight home, sat beneath Bert and gossiped happily about these people and their cheerless tree for the rest of the day.

And that’s the real meaning of Christmas.