Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: So ugly that it's beautiful

I can still remember, way back at Thanksgiving, leaving to go to my parents' house in the woods of Alabama and noticing that my wife had packed an ax and a bow saw.

That could only mean one thing: She was under the impression that we were cutting down our own Christmas tree.

I'm sure I said something to her, but I don't recall what it was. It might as well have been "Good grief."

You know, what Charlie Brown always said. You know, the round cartoon guy who picked out the miserable little tree for the Christmas pageant.

But this isn't the 1950s, when the "Peanuts" gang made their debut. It's the 21st century, when any American can pick up a perfectly symmetrical Douglas fir at the nearest home improvement store for the price of taking a family of six to Chick-fil-A.

Like any other Christmas, that's exactly what I planned to do.

But when Thanksgiving was over and we were preparing to head back to Columbus, Bess announced that it was time to go get our Christmas tree.

In the woods.

She was holding the ax in one hand and the bow saw in the other.

Good grief.

So we headed into the woods.

I won't lie and say it wasn't fun. Our daughter was home from college, and it felt good for the six of us to walk through the quiet woods. Not a single kid was texting.

After about half an hour, we found a cedar in the shadow of a giant pine that looked pretty good. We each took turns whacking it with the ax until it finally fell.

On the way out of the woods, we saw a much better cedar. It was in the middle of a field and had therefore been free its whole life to grow uninhibited from all sides. I mean, it was exponentially better.

That's when we realized two things. First, the tree we'd just cut down was whop-sided and scraggly because it had grown up in the shadow of a giant pine. And second, it had looked pretty good because it was in the shadow of the giant pine and we couldn't see it so well.

And for the first time, we truly understood one of the irrefutable laws of Christmas-tree cutting: A minute after you cut down a tree, you'll stumble upon a far better tree.

But it seemed wasteful to cut down another tree. We'd invested time finding the tree and we'd worked

together as a team to cut it down and carry it out. So we were stuck with it, even though we were pretty sure by now that it was Charlie Brown ugly.

And we were right. We took it home and put it in the stand and moved it into the living room, and it looked ugly. We festooned it with lights, and it looked even more ugly. We loaded it down with ornaments, to no avail. Then we topped it with a paper angel. The top of the tree drooped and the whole thing shifted toward the piano.

It got uglier every day. Then Bess invited some co-workers over for a Christmas party. At first, everybody was standing around eating dip and trying not to stare at the tree. But we started making fun of our own tree, which gave them permission to make fun of it, and everybody ended up laughing a lot and having a good time.

Somebody even asked what we thought the tree said about us.

Um, that we don't care what people think?

But that next year we're going to go back out in the woods and find a tree that wows everybody.

Dimon Kendrick-Holmes, executive editor, dkholmes@ledger-enquirer.com

This story was originally published December 19, 2014 at 10:48 PM.