By this time of year, most people either have a Christmas tree up and decorated in their living room or have assumed the attitude, "Oh, can we just skip it this year?"

While that latter idea entered my head briefly, it is more or less a given that we'll have tree, given that we happen to have five small children in my house.

But Christmas was quickly approaching and there was still no tree to be found anywhere in my house which was adequate to hold lights and ornaments. And the cries, "When are we going to get a tree?" were growing louder and more frequent with each passing day.

In a normal household, we could have quieted those pleas by simply going to the basement and retrieving an ever-ready Christmas tree from a box.

But not in my house. Setting up a Christmas tree was a day-long, if not longer affair.

We had an annual tradition of walking and walking and walking the river banks, in search of the perfect Christmas tree. After several hours and a sore back from carrying small children, we usually gave up on the perfect tree and settled for one which had needles on three-out-of-the-four sides.

We were also looking for a tree which would fit perfectly in the nine-foot ceilings in our house. Learn from our mistake: Trees out in the forest do not look as big as they really are. The tree may look only seven or eight-feet high out in the open, but as soon as it makes its way inside, the tree grows three or four feet. Not once in the past 10 years have we not had to remove the bent-over Christmas tree from the living room to cut off a couple of inches or, more commonly, a couple feet.

But this year, the cold, the snow, the early setting sun had prevented us from venturing to the woods for a tree. Plus, we had tired of killing a tree, only to turn it into mulch after just a few weeks.

We had a dilemma on our hands and the pleas for a tree continued. That's when the idea of a fake, artificial, non-real, whatever you want to call it, Christmas tree entered the picture.

There are numerous benefits to a fake Christmas tree. These modern, artificial Christmas trees are very easy to set up, in sharp contrast to the last fake tree I helped erect.

The last time I dealt with a fake tree was more than a dozen years ago and obviously I'm still traumatized. The construction of the tree usually took an entire afternoon, took immense patience and perseverance, and took keen eyesight to get all those color-coded branches into the "realistic" trunk.

Since the tree already had several years of use under its tree trunk by the time I got around to it, the colors on the branches had been severely altered. The paint was either faded, gone altogether or even worse, were so similar in shade that they couldn't be told apart. After four hours struggling with the tree, I would have liked to have strangled the tree-maker who thought it would be fun to mark the branches with red, orange and burnt sienna, or purple, sea blue and black -- on brown branches just to add insult to injury.

At this point, it was up to the installer, that would be me, to determine if the branch I was holding a 3-foot branch for the midsection of the tree or a 3-foot, 2-inch piece for the bottom midsection. As long as it looked like a cone when finished, the job could be considered a success.

In the end, I couldn't decide between a real tree or an artificial tree, so I settled on what seemed the most logical: I bought both.

I got a three-foot real tree, but it didn't have the towering grandeur or the ample space underneath for presents. Ideally, it would continue to grow, year after year, in its pot so eventually it could be big enough to be my family's lone Christmas tree. But in all likelihood, it will be dead by March.

I also got a cheap fake tree, lights included because I was feeling so lazy.

Granted it was easy to set up and we had it out of the box and completely decorated -- including sweeping up three broken ornaments -- within 20 minutes. But it looked a little too perfect, a little too much like a perfect triangle. There were no odd branches sticking out on the left side.

No bare spots on the right side. No tradition of cutting of the bottom third to make it fit in the house. But it will get my family through the Christmas season this year.

And we'll return to a real tree next year. We'll just have to start looking sooner, probably September.

-- Ronda Graff appreciates that the tree removal this year will only require a flick of the branches and a return to the box rather than the three sweepings and three vacuumings normally required.