"Besides, I think it needs me."

This year, our Christmas tree is a small one.  It's not as tiny as the one we brought home and decorated in 2006, which was the last Christmas we spent in our 600-square-foot cottage.  That year, Marley was a one-year-old and mobile, so we bought a three-foot live tree to place on a table out of her reach.  (We planted it in the woods behind our house after the holidays, and I remember wanting to bring it with us when we moved, but oh well.)  For the past few years, we've bought decent-sized trees, but last week when we went tree shopping at our favorite farm stand, the first one I pulled out was only about five feet tall.  "This is good," I said, probably because even though the house we're in now is twice as big as that cottage, there is still just enough room for everything we need.  There are no vaulted or raised ceilings in our house, and in fact, our upstairs rooms' ceilings, without any dormers, slope with our front and back roof lines.  Anyway, Todd reassured me that our tree could be bigger, and we moved on, but Marley kept running back to that five-footer and yanking it up herself with her freakish strength.  And then she started her pleading in earnest.

Because I was an early fan of that little guy, I didn't need any convincing.  But Todd was determined to get something bigger because, for crying out loud, our house isn't that small.  I told him quietly that a smaller tree might make this year's modest amount of presents seem more substantial, but he wandered on between the rows of trees.  Then, Marley started crying.

"I love this tree," she said.  "Please, please, please can we get this tree?  I love this tree! It's just my size!"  It was like a Charlie Brown Christmas, starring my favorite seven-year-old pipsqueak.  

That did it.  So then Marley posed red-eyed and relieved by her seasonal best friend, which meant that Rudy wanted a turn to pose mid-tree-embrace, too.  And we brought that little guy home and dressed him up the next day.

And it has just now occurred to me that our Christmas tree is "five-foot-nothing!", which obviously endears it to me even more.