Morgan

Not for amateurs, this business of picking the perfect Christmas tree. A real tree just makes Christmas—pine in the air, sap on the furniture, needles in the carpet, the whole bit. You can’t fake that. No petroleum-based, mold-formed, insert-figure-A-into-stalk-B imitation can take the place of a real tree. That pine-scented spray you’ve got isn’t fooling anybody. Your house smells like a cab.

Let’s begin with the size of the tree. Don’t give me some sad shrub, some Charlie Brown Christmas weed, barely able to hold up the 4-round dough ornament Aunt Helen baked and shellacked in 1978. No, give me a towering Fraser fir or Scotch pine. “I want big, son, big,” I tell the cadet. Every year I buy a tree that far exceeds the house. What caused that gougé down the center of the living room ceiling? The 15-footer of 1998. Those scratches on the side of the front door? That was one fat Fraser.

Sure, there are some rules. (As a former youth counselor advised, keeping the Holy Spirit between hugging and dancing young folk is probably a good idea although there seems to be some debate over the Spirit’s waistline.) Yet when it comes time to greet an old friend, to welcome a soldier or sailor home, to squeeze out sadness, to convey sheer joy, to comfort a hurt child or simply to say, “I love you,” nothing beats the humble Southern hug.