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Our Christmas tree is absolutely hideous.

It's fake, for one thing, because my asthma when I was younger scared my family away from things like real evergreens, cats, and cigarette smoke. Not to mention using the same tree every year is cheaper than buying a new one. It's five or six years old, you construct it branch by branch. You're supposed to fluff up the needles and slightly curve the ends of the twigs to make it look real, like the magazine-style picture on the front of the broken-spined box. After the first year or two, though, we didn't care enough, and now the branches are uniformly flattened with eleven months of attic life.

The top is messed up, so it won't stay upright- the few bits pointing up loll drunkenly in some kind of socket that's broken. Our star hangs tipsy from the top, a Pic 'n' Save original with lights that don't match the rest of the tree. But hey, why buy a new one when the old one still glows?

We've accumulated one of the most varied collections of home-made ornaments known to man, what with four kids, going through the same elementary school teachers and making at least one new hideous ornament every year from preschool to fifth grade. With, of course, the clothespin reindeer, beads-on-pipe-cleaner candy canes, and other kindergarten classics.

A couple years ago I went on a Christmas Tree Beautification campaign, trying to convince my mom to buy all new ornaments and scrap the old ones. Even the once-beautiful ornaments had been through too many years of falling off the tree and being repacked too carelessly. The silver was tarnished, the glass was cracked, many loops were missing and replaced by humiliated paper clips, anything with legs or moving parts had become crippled.

Then there was the Christmas we brought down the decorations and realized squirrels had been nesting in them. I hope the paint chips and uncooked macaroni angels gave the little boogers indigestion. They left enough droppings to fertilize our front lawn (yet another reason for ruined ornaments- angels just ain't so angelic when they're covered with squirrel poo).

That was the Christmas Mom caved. Threw away the squirrel-ruined decorations and bought three boxes of beautiful, shiny Christmas balls in red, gold, and purple- 18 each. We proudly decorated our tree solely with the newcomers, leaving the "family heirlooms" in the box where I thought they belonged.

My dad got home, took a look at the tree and said what was on all our disgruntled minds: "It looks like a department store tree."

This Christmas Mom waited until I got home to decorate for Christmas. Yesterday Brian and I swarmed around putting up the nativity scene (always arguing about which wise man shouldn't be there yet- I always put the Arabian one outside because his camel didn't fit in the barn) and set up the lopsided tree. I opened the "family heirlooms" and suddenly looked at them. On the top was a little felt Christmas tree with brick-a-brack around it, a cut out picture of my brother at nine months on it, all big eyes and tufty hair, looking like the Puppy I'd always called him.

"I'll just put the best of these on here; then we'll use the good ones," I said to Brian, and he shrugged and re-arranged the nativity while I wasn't looking.

The box was empty when he finally rejoined me. "There's no more room for the good decorations," he complained.

"I know." I saw a rattle dangling just by my fingertips, still embossed with Baby's First Christmas, 1982. Then I grinned. "Ain't it purty?"

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