The Christmas season is officially upon us, so it is time to deck your dorm rooms in twinkling lights, slather your dry skin in Vanilla Bean Noel from Bath & Body Works and make a holiday station on Pandora. Everyone has important traditions in their family whether that be reading “The Night Before Christmas” together on Christmas Eve, baking a birthday cake for Jesus or watching a series of claymation Christmas movies.
My family has tons of traditions of our own, but the one that always kicks off our holiday season is going Christmas tree shopping. Every year at the end of Thanksgiving weekend, we head out to the most glorious tree farm in the world. It is the cutest place imaginable, complete with horse-drawn wagon rides, complimentary hot cider and peanuts and a jolly family that owns the farm.
As I was traipsing across the acreage filled with countless kinds of pines, firs and spruces this year, I realized just how similar Christmas tree shopping is to dating. For those of you who have never experienced the joy of picking out a Christmas tree from a tree farm, let me tell you what I mean.
If your family wouldn’t approve, why bother? If you are a person who values the opinion of your family, spotting unworthy trees and relationships are easy. If you know your parents wouldn’t approve there is no reason to take the tree home. For example, my family appreciates a genuine person as much as a genuine tree. We turn away quickly from trees that have been heavily spray-painted green because they don’t even seem real.
A good Christmas tree should be like your significant other in the fact that you want to take him or her home and have your mother beam with pride as she poses you next to one another to snap a memory card’s worth of awkward pictures.
You can’t fix crookedness. Sometimes a Christmas tree looks darn near perfect at first glance, but after further examination, you realize the trunk is completely crooked. A lot of families seem to think that even if they buy a tree with a crooked trunk, they’ll be able to straighten it out in the tree stand at home.
I feel like many college girls have similar thought processes. Let’s say they begin to date a guy who has a history of infidelity. They think to themselves, “Sure, he may have been wild before dating me, but I will be able to straighten him out.” Go ahead and give it a shot, but don’t say I didn’t warn you when your tree breaks free of the tree stand and crashes through your window.
Don’t buy the first tree you see. Take your time to shop around. Half the fun of tree shopping, as well as dating, is the experience. Don’t settle too quickly.
Don’t fall for the ones already spoken for. Christmas tree shopping is highly competitive. Many families head out in early November to select their perfect tree. Each tree is marked with a tag, and if the tree is sold, the bottom of the tag is torn off and a ribbon is tied onto the tree. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on this tree farm and ran up to what looked like the most perfect tree in the world only to discover it was already taken.
This seems to be the case with college students sometimes too. Maybe you went out earlier this year and met a guy who you ended up talking to for hours. You had so much in common, you felt mutual attraction and you begin to wonder if this is what being swept off your feet feels like. Only at the end of the night one of his girlfriend’s friends walks up to you and tells you exactly what you didn’t want to hear: You know he’s taken right? At least with trees you have a ribbon to give you your answer; no Facebook stalking or asking around needed. Either way, when this happens, it is always disappointing.
No matter how badly you may want someone else’s tree, you can’t have it. If another family found their perfect tree first, you can’t just go chop it down yourself and take it home. If a tree, or a person, is taken already, respect that.
You might not realize how much you like a tree, until you see another family notice it. My family often picks out three or four trees to keep our eyes on during our time shopping. We usually mark the tree in some way, so we know where to go back and find it. When it is time to make our final decision about which tree we like the best, we often approach an area only to see another family standing around one of the trees we marked.
In the dating world this tree would be equal to the girl you were attracted to but just can’t decide how much you actually like. One night you see another guy talking to her at a bar and he is clearly interested in her, only you don’t care in the slightest. Without even intending to do so, you’ve found your answer: you don’t really like her all that much to begin with. But if you see this situation and are ready to sprint over and run interference, then maybe this is a girl (or tree) worth the fight.
At the end of the day, it is all worth it. Okay, yes I stepped in horse poop during my great tree hunt, and my entire body was numb from being in the high speed winds for so long, but it was all worth it because I found the perfect tree. So don’t be discouraged if you’ve been stepping in the horse poop of the romance department lately. It is possible that it is actually all worth it in the end.