Is it really real?

We rock around a real Christmas tree. It was a holiday tradition for my sister and I to go out with our parents and help pick out and cut down a tree. It has become the same thing for our girls. Full disclosure, my sister's husband's family owns a Christmas tree farm, and you don't want to be the ones caught with the fake tree.

There is no shortage of places to get a real tree, mind you. The Lions Club, the Optimist Club, community organizations with lots around town, Lowes, Wal Mart, etc. Sometimes I'm asked, why don't you get a tree that's already cut? I could go with the Tevye/Fiddler on the Roof answer...TRADITION! (tradition)! And that's part of it. But there is something more basic, that cuts to how I roll.

I'd rather put money in the hands/pockets of friends or family. This is an across the board philosophy. I've got nothing against Starbucks--they have perhaps improved the quality of coffee, nationwide. But I'd rather give my money to Tim Cureton and Rise Up Coffee (plus the coffee is better). Dogfish and Fat Tire are fine beers, which I enjoy drinking. But Geoff DeBisschop and Evolution Craft Brewing Co. are making the best stuff around and they are friends.

I applaud and try to go with the buy local approach as best I can. But supporting friends goes much deeper. Especially when you have talented friends who are doing cool things.

Plato offered up as one possible definition of justice, helping your friends and thwarting your enemies. It would be hard to argue that as a universal principle for mankind (unless you can do so without having any enemies), but in my limited, personal world, I like it. Particularly the first part.

When I can further a tradition and give a fun, meaningful experience to my family and help my friends at the same time... well, that's tinsel on the tree. A real tree.

"I got the trees on my mirror"

The smell was from one of the earlier haunted houses. The one that was at the old Idlewild school. I must have been in elementary school. I don't like the abuse/bastardization of the word epic, but those haunted houses were. There were illusions, hydraulic floors, swinging bridges, chainsaws, then flame-throwers. All volunteer, put on by the Kiwanis Club, work done in the evenings. They were community events, and scarier than any haunted houses I've seen since.

The smell was from the room my father's crew haunted, set up like a swamp, with brush and cattail cuttings, or the one next door, which was a woods scene. It was something that had been cut. But the smell this time wasn't from elementary school, or Idlewild, but this past Sunday, during a run along Rails to Trails. It was instant recognition as the same smell, it conjured it up precisely, to the sea creature mask my dad wore.

My wife has mentioned a smell--something like honeysuckle maybe, but I can't recall--that she knows as her grandfather. Something that was in his house. When she smells it, she knows it is him saying hello.

I am sight-oriented. For learning, for memorizing, I have always been a visual person. Smell would probably rank among my least go-to senses. Which made the haunted house flashback, while out for a 5-mile rise up run Sunday morning, stand out more.

It's a season of smells. The smell of Thanksgiving in Butler, Pa., and the smell of a soon-to-be-cut Christmas tree in the living room. It's likely my nose getting ready. Nose in training. Amping up performance for the evergreen smell that smells like childhood.