O Christmas Tree

We lost our Christmas tree.

Nevermind that it was a seven-foot artificial tree and much too heavy for me to move. It isn't where it's supposed to be, and hasn't been for two years.

Last year we made do with a three-foot tree when we discovered the big one was missing.

A year later, we still can't find the Christmas tree. So we bought another. But we don't know what happened to the old one.

You see, we kept it in the bathtub. It was encased in a rather expensive plastic container, with a lid that closed tightly. I have terrible allergies and there's nothing like the dust from stored Christmas decorations to get the nasals dripping. The plastic crate helped a lot.

We kept the entire thing in the bathtub because we had no other place to store it. The tub is in the second bathroom and it goes unused. I thought I might as well do something with the space.

So last year we went to put up the tree. But the tree was gone. Husband doesn't remember what he did with it. Wife doesn't remember, either.

We checked everywhere we might have put it. The attic. The storage shed. The garage.

No artificial tree. No big plastic container, either.

We must have given it away, but we don't remember to whom. Or maybe we decided it was getting thin and needed to be thrown out. But surely we'd have kept the plastic crate.

It's a head scratcher all right.

Our saga with artificial trees began in 1984. This was our second Christmas together, the first happening not long after we married. We were in a new little house and Husband brought in a pretty little real tree.

Ah, the smell of pine!

Ah, the sneezes. The watery eyes. The wheezing.

Yes, it was time to acknowledge that Anita is allergic to pine trees, and has been all her life. My mother told me a few years before she died that she took ill during the Christmas she was pregnant with me. She broke out in hives after an adventure in the woods to find and bring in a tree. An act, she was sure, that cursed me with a propensity toward allergies whenever I was in the presence of pine. Or so she thought, anyway.

I grew up with live Christmas trees, and while I was generally sick during the holiday, I never made the connection between the tree and my sneezes. Neither, apparently, did anyone else.

Following the tree-trimming, my allergies were woefully and painfully obvious in 1984. So we undecorated the tree and we tossed it out.

We got another live pine from somewhere and we scarcely got it in the house before my wheezing made it readily apparent that this wasn't going to work. It wasn't just that particular pine tree, it was any pine tree.

So that tree left the premises, too. We went to Sears and bought our first artificial tree. Not so nice, but less detrimental. That was the year of three trees.

Over the years we've had nice artificial trees. In 1993 Husband gave me a lovely florist tree for an anniversary present. It eventually lost its needles and we replaced it with another.

And that's the one we've lost, and it was well before it was time for it to go. So if you should see an artificial tree looking lonely and undorned by the side of the road, maybe thumbing a ride, give us a call.

It might be the one that, all on its own, disappeared from our bathtub.