My mom and I butted heads. But never at the Christmas Tree Shops.

But there were two places where all that fell away, where we curbed our war of words for a couple of hours on Saturday afternoons: the grocery store, where we indulged our sublime love of food, and the Christmas Tree Shops, where we satiated our love of the ridiculous. Whether it was Lynnfield or Somerville (the closest locations to my mom’s home), we’d pull in hot to the lot and grab our carriages, each of us zipping away in opposite directions, relieved to separate. My mother and I had a...