By now, those folks who do have their Christmas tree decorated, waiting on packages to go underneath and family and friends to gather around. I have known of folks having a Christmas tree upstairs and downstairs in their home. I have heard of folks having a tree in every room of their home. I saw on the news this week a couple who had 444 decorated Christmas trees in their home. Wow!
Christmas trees were handled differently in our home in our childhood and even to this day. Big Daddy and Mother came from families that did not do a lot of marking of the holiday. Mother tells about the final day of school before the holiday, kids would pick a present off the Christmas tree . . . and that would be their Christmas celebration. We had to learn to be creative and frugal in our Christmas tree decorating when my brothers and sisters were still at home. Primarily, because Big Daddy did like spending "good money" on a tree that is up for a couple of days, leaving pine needles and tinsel in its wake when it is drug out to the bar ditch, where it will lay until Spring when the chipper trucks finally come by.
On those years that Big Daddy refused to go to the K-mart parking lot to buy a live tree, we kids created our own trees. We decorated tall lamps with the lights and garland. Mother had a tall blue vase with a kind of swan neck that became O Tannenbaum one year. We would hang the lights in the shape of a tree in the upstairs window that faced the street. One year, Mother made Rice Krispies squares. We stacked them up like a tree and used gum drops for the ornaments. We had a brown swivel side chair in the living room that, yes indeedy, became our tree one year. Once, in the last few years since our move back to Tennessee, I stacked up VHS boxes to simulate a tree.
For several years in a row at our house in East Moline, Mother cut the top out of a pine tree for a table-top tree. She cut until it pretty much became a flat-top pine tree. I think it was the first or second Christmas in the new house on the farm, when Mother kept watch all year long on what she thought would make a beautiful Christmas tree. When the boys came in for the holiday, she sent them down in the woods behind the house. As they drug it back up to the house, she noticed it was about three times the size she thought it was. The boys kept cutting from the top and little off the bottom until they could get it in the door. The top still bent a little against the ceiling.
One Christmas, I was home from college and Big Daddy and Mother had gone to a friend's house for a Christmas party, Kay, James and I pooled our money and went out to the K-Mart parking lot and bought a tree. We brought it in through the basement and left a trail of pine needles for Big Daddy to follow when they came home. It was, however, all set up (and what fun that was!) and decorated before the folks’ return.
In the past few years, most of our Christmas decorations (sparce as they are) have been purchased at the Macon County Chamber of Commerce annual banquet. There is the wreath with white lights by the front door, a metal snowman in the front yard and a small tree made from tobacco sticks strung with wooden ornaments and orange lights. An old-fashioned streetlamp stands on the other side of the front door from the wreath. Several years ago, Mother made a star from tobacco sticks and covered it with multi-color lights, it hangs in the little house in the front yard.
Our tree this year is our Anthony Tree. Built by our friend, Anthony, with the message: “It’s not what’s under the tree but who’s around it”. I hope this season finds you gathered around your Christmas tree – no matter the shape, size, color or composition – with those you love.
Merry Christmas!