Ten years ago I became self-employed. It was October first. Anybody who ever made the jump knows how disruptive, stressful, worrisome this can be. Especially when you also have rent to pay and ventured into an industry new to you. That year, getting a Christmas tree almost slipped my mind. One day, about a week before Christmas I suddenly realized that I better get with the program. After closing the shop I went to the garden center. I bought every tree there since I moved to Vancouver. It’s also a lovely place to go to because it is always totally decked out with Christmas decorations, lights, and greenery. That evening, it was raining and dark, I arrived totally stressed at the garden center. I noticed that the selection of Christmas trees was rather sparse. Given that it was already very close to Christmas, plus the fact that trees in North America are put up in early December, this of course made sense. I asked the gentleman, who has helped me as long as I can remember, were the small trees are. He replied, that there’s only two small ones left. And that they are “Charlie Browns”. I thought, oh how cute is that, he named them, and both have the same name. I was very happy to buy one. The tree was already in a net, which meant, off I went. At home I put our Charlie Brown in a bucket of water and placed it on the balcony. I usually decorate our Christmas tree around December 12th. But that year everything was different. The day came to take Charlie Brown inside. Decorating the tree is always something I enjoy doing. It’s a ritual. And going through the boxes with ornaments that have been collected over the years brings back so many memories. The first thing that had to be done with the tree, was cutting open the net. And oh the horror! What is this?! It was the ugliest Christmas tree I have ever seen. More disappointed I could not have been. Even though at that time I lived over ten years in Canada, I heard of Charlie Brown trees, but I have never read the book or seen the movie. Only when Klaus told me, that a “Charlie Brown tree” is an ugly tree, I googled it and there they were… I reluctantly decorated the tree after all. Charlie looked very sad. There was really no help to make that scrawny thing come alive. But in the end, we had a wonderful Christmas just like the years before and the years after that. It remained however the only tree I never photographed. A few years later I received the deluxe edition of A Charlie Brown Christmas. Happy ending, after all. Author: Esther Schönwandt 
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