My Fake Plastic Christmas Tree
The ginger bread houses we made as kids. A fresh cut pine tree. A turkey roasting in the oven. This strange glue my mom would use to make Christmas ornaments with. Each of these smells reminds me of the Holidays and when I smell them, I immediately feel the magic and excitement of Christmas. That same magic that I felt as a kid. And now add to that list, the smell of a fake plastic Christmas tree.
In 2006, my wife and I went down to Costco and bought a fake Christmas tree. We had a wonderful Christmas and then put the tree into storage. The following year, I pulled the tree out of storage and prepared to set it up. As I opened the large cardboard box, the smell of the plastic tree wafted over me and it immediately felt like Christmas.
As I put up the tree, I started to think about all the reasons that I liked the tree. The plastic smell reminded me of Christmas. You never needed to water it. It always stayed green. I also started to think about songs like O Tannenbaum that people had written about Christmas trees. But these songs were about real trees and made no mention of the things I loved about my fake tree. At that moment, I realized I needed to write a song about a fake plastic Christmas tree and why I loved it. The song was born.
I think I only wrote two versus and the chorus that year. I also came up with the melody and the guitar chords for the song. Each Christmas for the next few years, I would pull out my guitar and the lines I had written on a piece of scratch paper, and would sing the song. And each year, I would promise that someday I would record it as an actual song. It wasn’t until several years later that I came up with the intro to the song and wrote what would become the second verse about the different colored trees. I was inspired when my wife bought each of the kids a small tree to go in their rooms and was able to finish the song.
After several years of thinking about it, I finally started recording at the end of July 2012.