Dear Christmas Tree Huggers:

With the weather feeling more like April than December, it’s a little harder to get into the Christmas spirit, but calendars are unrelenting, so for inspiration I’ll dig back into the past hoping to find that little thread that will amusingly unravel that ugly Christmas sweater of memory.

When I was little, about this time of year the family would head down to Omaha’s Old Market looking for our annual tree. That area of downtown Omaha is now filled with trendy shops and high-end restaurants, but back then it was a dilapidated wholesale produce market where tree sellers would unstrap their wares priced by the foot. Of course, most of us kids wanted the tallest tree possible. Knowing our living room ceiling was about nine feet, subtracting for the tree topper which looked a little like an eight-inch satellite with a silver spire, and adding about six inches to the bottom for the tree stand, we figured an eight and a half foot tree would max out the height, leaving a little space