From 2006:
Why, then, did I never get around to putting up a tree of my own after I left home? The answer, I suppose, is that since I made a point of coming back to Smalltown, U.S.A., for the holidays each year, I never found it necessary. What began as a convenience hardened into habit, and by the time I was forty the notion of buying and decorating a Christmas tree seemed to me senseless. No doubt that said more about the confusion of my private life than it did about any domestic urges I was sweeping under the rug, but whatever my deeper reasons might have been, the fact remains that the tree I trimmed last week is the first one I’ve had in thirty-two years….
Read the whole thing here.