On Sunday afternoon, my husband and I put up the old artificial Christmas tree in our family room, as we always do over Thanksgiving weekend. We bought it in 1994, when our kids were little and we were in our starter house. The tree looks too short for the tall ceiling here, and every year more plastic needles fall off. We can’t bring ourselves to throw it away because of fond memories. But at least, it’s had a bit of a makeover with new, thicker tinsel strands to brighten it up.

Since my blog is supposed to be about modern life, I started wondering if a post about my family being sentimental about an outdated fake Christmas tree suited the theme. That got me thinking about the origin of the word “modern,” which I knew came from Latin, but I wasn’t sure if the Romans thought of modernity in terms of being more advanced than the barbarians. So, I looked it up and found that the original Latin word simply meant “at the present time,” and it wasn’t until much later that the English word acquired the connotation of living in a more advanced time.

That left me feeling better about mentioning my family’s antiquated Christmas tree in a post. It’s here at the present time, so it’s modern by Roman standards, anyway. And of course, keeping it and buying a new tree don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Maybe next year we’ll buy a tall new tree that’s better suited to the dimensions of our family room, while setting up the old one in a corner of the basement. There’s no reason to confine holiday cheer to the main floor, after all.