I have a picture of myself as a kid, standing in the snow next to a little pine tree with my mittens pinned to the sleeves of my winter coat. My parents planted that tree in their yard when I was born and I grew up watching it grow, year after year, until finally it eclipsed me at some point in grade school. My parents still live in the house where they brought me after I was born, and the tree is tall and mighty now.

This year, we didn't buy an ordinary Christmas tree. We went to our local gardening store with some friends who'd recently moved to San Francisco from Detroit, and while admiring flats of flowers for sale outdoors in December, we asked what kind of potted pine-like tree we could buy that we could eventually plant some where and survive on its own. Her answer: Rosemary. For the last month we've had lights strung around a rosemary bush cut to look like a Christmas tree in our living room. It smells wonderful, adds great flavor to chicken, and it is exactly as tall as our daughter.

But we're renters. We have no lawn. We're going to have to find somewhere to plant it, to sneak in like criminals and plant the bush where its roots can clutch the earth and thrive. And some day, long after we've moved away, maybe we'll come back and try to find it, to tell our daughter the story of her first year and her first Christmas in the glow of lights wrapped around a rosemary bush in a little apartment in the greatest city in the world.