Splash of Pine Sol lends authenticity to artificial conifers on Christmas Day

I tried sprinkling Pine Sol around the living room, figuring it might lend my made-in-China Christmas tree the piney aroma of the real thing.

Not a great idea. No matter. I’m sticking with yuletide fakery. Not just because of the prohibitive cost of the real thing, although paying $70 dollars for a shrub not much taller than my Aunt Louise would pain my chintzy soul. (Doreen Christensen, the Sun-Sentinel’s champion of beleaguered consumers, reported last month that tight supply has inflated the average cost of this year’s crop by 10 bucks a tree.)

My aversion to authenticity transcends economics. I’ve embraced vague pine-like facsimiles – conical assemblies of metal poles and wire branches, all dressed up in green plastic confetti – after a long history of misadventures with the natural kind.

I’ve suffered through all manner of conifer catastrophes: Trees that listed like drunks. (One year I was forced to secure the treetop to a rafter.) Trees that plop over, also like drunks, and flood the floors with brown sappy water. Shoddy strands of tree lights that shorted out, popped a fuse and shrouded the house in darkness. Dogs that mistook tree ornaments as chew toys. Another dog, confused by the piney odor, that peed on the tree. I could understand the canine logic: why wait to be escorted outdoors when the outdoors has relocated to the living room?

My incompatibility with this peculiar, possibly pagan icon known as the Christmas tree dates back to a cold, snowy December day in southern West Virginia. It was 1955, a year notable in American history for a riot that broke out among concertgoers in Jacksonville after Elvis Presley uttered, ‘’Girls, I’ll see you backstage.’’ (I’ve tried the same line over the years to a less-than-riotous effect.)

The McDonald’s chain (and our national obesity epidemic) was launched in 1955. Velcro was invented. Bill Gates was born. The first TV dinners rolled down the assembly line. I desperately coveted the year’s hot new technological gadget -- a transistor radio featuring a single plastic earpiece, marketed to us kids as ‘’no bigger than a pack of Camels.”

Gasoline went for 23 cents a gallon in

1955. Whatever Christmas trees cost that year, it was too much for my old man.

I’d wish I could say a nostalgic impulse led my father to eschew the convenience of roadside Christmas tree peddlers. No. It was the money. He was a child of the Great Depression and not about to pay good money in town for what grew abundant and free in the woods on the other side of our mountain.

What his macho tree quest had to do with me, I’m not sure. Perhaps, he imagined wilderness training would toughen up a puny 8-year-old who had flunked out of Cub Scouts.

Unhappily, the life lesson became a harbinger for Christmas tree traumas to come. That first disaster became inevitable when the father-and-son lumberjacks dawdled until the afternoon before hiking over the mountain crest into the snowy forest, armed with an ax and undue optimism.

Symmetry, the woodsmen discovered, was not a common characteristic among impoverished pines languishing in the shade of oaks and tulip poplars. Undaunted, we searched on, ever deeper into the woods, ignoring a darkening sky, increasing snow. Finally, defeated in his Ahab-like quest for the perfect tree, my father improvised. He climbed a tall pine, forlorn except for a bushy crown, and chopped off the upper eight feet.

By then, the snowfall had become a heavy flurry that obscured the path home and the way around the smelly gray gook along the edge of a not quite frozen ash pond, pumped there from a chemical plant over the mountain, oozing with what would probably be classified as toxic waste in 2018.

I blundered into thick gunk. When I tried to extract myself, the sludge sucked the rubber galoshes off my feet. I stood in wet socks, ankle deep in muck, miles from home, forever disabused of pine tree nostalgia.

Yet mad dad soldiered on. Me on his back. Tree in tow. Daylight fading. Snow falling. We would have been lost except the only way home was up the mountain. At least, we knew which way was up.

Finally, like Arctic explorers back from oblivion, we emerged from the woods with a tree so lopsided and bedraggled my mother -- not the sentimental type -- banned it from the premises. That night, the defeated explorers cranked up the Packard and slunk into town, tree shopping.

Maybe the Christmas trauma of 1955 explains that thing by the front window in

2018, a counterfeit tree, lights permanently installed, looking vaguely like the real thing except for a noticeable gap where the upper and middle sections join. And maybe the crown wobbles a bit in its ill-fitting sleeve. At least this artificial version, however unconvincing, doesn’t threaten to tumble over. Dogs ignore it. It requires no water. It only requires a little imagination.

I’m thinking of leaving the top section off this year, for old times’ sake, so it resembles that pathetic pine tree my father had climbed and decapitated 63 Christmases ago. To lend the tableau natural Christmas tree authenticity, I’ll add a splash of Pine Sol.

Fred Grimm (@grimm_fred or leogrimm@gmail.com), a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a reporter and columnist in South Florida since 1976.