It’s only recently that I’ve begun taking photographs of our Christmas tree. For almost five years we didn’t put one up, even after moving to the country–we were too busy with work, school, housework, or feared that one of our cats would try to climb it while we were away from the house. But we missed not having one, and at Christmas our new, high-ceilinged, bewindowed home seemed incomplete without one. And since living in the country means that you can’t drive down a road in my little town without seeing the hand-lettered signs on every other utility pole indicating where you could get your holiday fix of pine needles and pitch, it seemed unsporting to hold out just for practicality’s sake. So we caved, and now go to a nearby gentleman’s farm every year and cut our own. We’ve even gotten into the habit of acquiring one or two new ornaments a year, mainly to replace the inevitable broken or faded one–with the exception of one winter when we went on a bauble-buying binge at Macy’s and Pier One Imports and came home with two shopping bags full, some of which we have yet to take out of their boxes.
My tree-related memories are full of quirky details. My mother didn’t trust tree stands. She was deathly afraid that the tree would somehow topple over on its own, despite my dad’s calm competence in placing it in the metal stand, centering it just so, and screwing the eyebolts into the trunk so far that they could have met in the middle. So each year, at her insistence, he attached multiple metal guy wires from the tree’s trunk to the wall on either side. This of course meant multiple holes in the nondescript living-room wallpaper, which we hid the rest of the year with a large, worn, overstuffed easy chair that most of the year mainly functioned as a holding area for unironed laundry.
Because printed paper bricks denote permanence!
They also painstakingly hung brick-patterned crepe paper behind the tree with thumb tacks. To this day I have no idea how this was supposed to add to the holiday feel of the decor. The fake fireplace across the room that my trash-picking mother had spotted on the curb on night on the way home from her nightly bingo game–complete with fun, fake fire blinking behind colored cellophane–at least suggested the old-fashioned solidity of a real hearth. I mean, why would someone need to pretend that a tree, an indoor one at that, was backed by a half-height brick wall?
There it stands, in all its gleaming splendor….
The big thing when I was growing up in the late 50s/early 60s was the aluminum Christmas tree. To my mind, only the trendiest of families had them–flashy, feathery confections of wire and tinsel lit by rotating color wheels. The convention was that you adorned them with ornaments that were identical in color, if not shape, like in a department store window of the time, which is probably where the style originated. I yearned for one of those trees, so gleaming, space-age and sparkly compared to the thinly-branched but fragrant cut balsam from Canada that we bought each year from one of the dealers that appeared overnight each December in car lots and church parking lots. Compared to those bright modern visions of Christmases yet to come, I felt our real tree looked dated and tacky, especially since my parents insisted on dragging out the faded paper chains we had made as kindergarteners and draping them over the branches alongside the motley collection of ornaments we owned.
Aluminum trees were expensive and needed to be disassembled and stored, so given that we didn’t have much money and that closet space was at a premium in our two-family Victorian, my dreams of a silvery, glittery Christmas remained, alas, unfulfilled. I consoled myself with the fact that at least once a year some beknighted family lost one of its members to electrocution because against all warnings they strung electric lights on the tree instead of using a color wheel. That’s what they get for being trendsetters, damn them!
As a rule hubby and I never put up our tree earlier than a week before the actual holiday. We’re stubborn that way. I abhor the rushing of the season, which now seems to begin as soon as the Thanksgiving dinner plates are cleared away. To put up a tree purchased from a parking lot dealer would mean that by December 26 you would be left with a dry, needle-shedding nuisance. That’s less of a consideration out here in Podunk, where a fresh-cut tree from any of a half-dozen growers within a five-minute car ride will with diligent watering stay soft and green until Valentines’s Day. But we still wait until what for most people is the last minute to buy and decorate ours.
A Christmas tree is not just a decoration in our home. The act of assembling one is a ritual that we celebrate as a couple, with hot mulled cider, spicy hermit cookies, and Maddy Prior singing her quirky Christmas carol arrangements in her quirky, medieval-tinged voice, or with NPR program hosts murmuring decorously in the background. Spousal Unit puts on the lights. He will brook no interference in that task from anyone. My job is to stand back and admire, and to point out where there might be an unseemly confluence of a single color. We put the garland on next, six thick ropes of white and silver that we pass back and forth around the tree until the illusion of snow-covered branches is achieved. Then the ornaments, which are really the fun part. Our collection contains fragile blown glass ornaments from China, Romania, and a few rare antiques from back in the Shiny Brite™ days when they were mass produced in the good ol’ U.S.A. The handcrafted type (mainly purchased at craft shows and community fairs) are well-represented, along with ones that were party or wedding favors, acquired on our trips abroad and across the country, and gift ornaments from friends and relatives or their children.
Most of them represent our interests. A jolly blown-glass chef, a realistic resin wine bottle with paper label; many, many cat and bird-themed ornaments (including at least four owls, peering at us spookily from the branches). Lots of travel-themed ornaments and miniature musical instruments or sheet music. A collection of gold-plated laser-cut filigree ornaments, some representing landmarks in the city where we lived for 18 years, including a replica of the triple-decker house we lived in, are scattered around the branches. Exotic, hand-embroidered sequined ornaments from India and Pakistan. Strangely, there are no chicken-themed ornaments. I have to fix that; around certain circles I am known as the “Chicken Lady.”
I have no ornaments from my childhood in our collection. Once my mother died and my father stopped putting up a full-size tree my sisters snapped up the good ones (and there weren’t many) before I had a chance to claim dibs on any. That makes me wistful, but it’s OK–I’m not into holiday nostalgia, in part because throughout my high school years Christmas became more and more a time for screaming fights over money and silent, unhappy holiday meals. Once I started college I began spending Christmases with the family of the man who would later become my husband of over 30 years. We now have the collection he inherited from his parents to admire and adorn our tree, including three huge blown-glass balls almost five inches in diameter, handpainted with wintry designs, and a dozen or so other genuine antiques, some dating from the Thirties.
The memories you make for yourself, no matter how recent, are the best, and we’re doing a pretty good job of it, I’d say. Maybe at some point we’ll hold an open house to the friends and neighbors who have been so good to us here in town. Until then, we’ll cocoon in our pretty little country house and bring a fragrant bit of the outdoors into our living room in our own way, for our own eyes, just the way we like it.
(Aluminum tree photo from Go Retro!, a fantastic blog for those into nostalgia.)
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