Poor Domingo. I have dragged him all over town the past couple of weeks looking for our third tree, our main tree. We’ve been to Lowes (twice!), Home Depot (twice!), Sears, JCPenney, Walmart… If they sold an artificial tree we were there.

We wanted a 7 1/2 foot, tree with colored lights. I had visions of something that reminded me of the Christmas trees of my childhood, like our old tree. The height was proving to be the easy feature.

I believe our last tree was a Holiday Living tree from Lowes. I remember purchasing it at a home improvement store, and the Holiday Living line – a lowes brand – had the same foot on/off switch, and the same tree base. I wanted to like the new Holiday Living Trees. We even picked out a tree (box 18). But when Domingo went to put one of the boxes in our cart I hesitated. They had no less than five Box 18 trees. We could afford to keep searching a few more days, I reasoned.

The problem was that it wasn’t a tree with purely colored lights. Like most trees we found with colored LED lights, it also had the ability to switch to pure white lights. This is accomplished by multiple leds in a clear bulb, rather than a clear light in a colored bulb. As a result they had far fewer colors: blue, green, yellow and red. For a tree with color lights, it seemed rather lacking in color. What I really needed was a tree with old fashioned incandescent lights.

But those we found with the incandescent lights looked decidedly artificial. The nicer looking trees all had LEDs. I guess incandescent lights are considered lesser.

We were out of options, and with Turkey day approaching, out of time. I started looking online at Amazon Prime eligible trees. At least then I could find some trees that matched both the height and light type criteria. Each listing included the number of branch tips, but branch quality was a bit of a question mark. PE (molded) or PVC (cut-out)? Both? And if so, in what ratio? I prefer to see my trees in person. Not all cuts/molds are equal in my mind.

In the end I decided the lights mattered more to be than branch tips, so I decided to take a chance.

Tree ordered, sight unseen.

Here’s hoping.

Edited to add:

I’m happy. It has a bit more “filler” branches than I would have wanted at the price point. It is much closer to the tree in our mind’s eye than any of the others we’ve seen, and that counts for a lot.

Posted in Shopping | Tags: Christmas