The box lived in the crawl space under the back stairs, wrapped in burlap and tied with twine. Every year, my father brought it up the day after Remembrance Day. He set it in the center of the living room, where the shag carpet had worn thin from years of vacuum tracks.

He opened it slowly, as if the contents might shift. Out came a wooden pole, painted brown to look like bark, and a metal stand with four legs that clicked into place with a sound like a typewriter key. Then the branches: plastic, stiff, color-coded with red, green, and yellow tabs. Each branch slid onto the pole in a specific order. My job was to hand him the right one.

The tree smelled of dust and something faintly sweet, like old vinyl left in a hot car. The flocking on the tips of the higher branches had yellowed over the years. My father didn’t dust it off. He just assembled.

Each branch had to be bent into position. The plastic was stiff, reluctant to look natural. You’d pull them down, spread them out, try to make them look like they’d grown that way. The flocking helped, softening the edges, but it was still clearly a manufactured thing trying to pass for something that grew in a forest.

When the last branch clicked into place, he plugged in the string of C9 bulbs—red, green, blue, clear. They warmed slowly, casting thick pools of color on the wood-paneled walls. The kind that got hot enough to warm your palm if you cupped them. The plastic needles caught the light in sharp glints.

My mother brought in the box of ornaments from the hall closet. She didn’t start hanging them right away. She just stood there, arms crossed, watching the tree blink in the dim room. The TV played a commercial for dish soap. Someone laughed off-screen.

By evening, the tree stood fully lit, slightly lopsided where the third branch from the top refused to stay level. It didn’t sway. It didn’t drop needles. It just stood, casting its colored light onto the shag, the wood paneling, the ashtray on the coffee table.

The tree stayed up until New Year’s, maybe a few days after. Then it came apart in reverse order, each section wrapped in an old sheet and returned to the basement box. The living room looked empty for a week, the carpet still dented where the base had been, a few plastic needles hiding in the shag until spring cleaning found them.