christmas treeThere are two kinds of people who celebrate Christmas in this world. The fake tree people and the real tree people. The fact that I'm in the latter camp is something of a Christmas miracle.

I'm not going to sugarcoat it. My first Christmas as a married woman was the stuff of nightmares. Big spider-infested nightmares. Arachnophobes beware, this one is not for the faint of heart.

It all started the way your first holiday as a newlywed is supposed to start. There was a lot of cutesy talk about my cuddlebug and adorable musings about what my sexy Santa was going to bring me for our first official Christmas. Don't knock it. We were young. We were in love! We would have made you vomit!

And we very nearly did ourselves!

I had my heart set on the perfect Christmas, and if I had to spend the holidays far from my childhood home of snowy upstate New York, gosh darnit, I was going to do it with a real tree. So off we went with our friends Wendy and Woodie (I swear, not making that up) to a tree farm to chop down our own tree.

As someone who grew up in bumble-ahem nowhere, you'd think this would be old hat. But folks, my small town parents were as boring as it gets. We went to the farm stand and got our tree, already cut and waiting for us.

Going the whole nine and chopping this thing down was like one of the puzzle pieces in my picture perfect romantic Christmas. And it was. We dragged it out of there. We put it on the top of Woodie's van and drove it home to our little apartment, where we took the brand new ornaments and lights (colored because that's the way I roll), and strung them on our new little tree in its new little stand, and made kissy faces, and let the carols play while my new husband groaned.

And all was good and right with the world.

Until two days later.

Let me tell you, the words you never want to hear are "Honey, what's that sticky stuff on the presents?" Well, that and "And what is that black stuff . . . oh my God, it's moving!"

You know what it was. Spiders. A billion of them. At least it seemed like it. Maybe it was just thousands. But those suckers decided they were going to hatch right in my G.D. first Christmas tree. Bastards!

You want to know how my romantic Christmas was spent? I was chasing my husband across the top floor of an old house -- aka our little apartment. Because no one warned me that I should have some kind of bug killer on hand, I had a bottle of Lysol multi-purpose cleaner in my hand, and I was squeezing the trigger like mad as he dragged a Christmas tree as fast as he could out of our house. I swear to you folks, my apartment might have been full of creepy crawlies, but it was the CLEANEST Christmas in 11 years of marriage. And that's saying something, isn't it?

Are you a real tree fan or are you afraid of what that tree will bring into your humble abode?

 

Image via sdminor81/Flickr