Christmas Trees

Hopefully everyone's come out of their food coma and have rested up from Black Friday shopping. I'm resting up from putting up our Christmas decorations. I have a few things that haven't found a home for the season yet, but if I don't find a good spot they'll be ready for next year. One of these days I need to get in the mood to address our Christmas cards!

I enjoy having the freedom to decorate for Christmas on the day after Thanksgiving. It's amazing how much leeway you have with an artificial tree! They may drop a few “needles”, but you can put them up early and not worry how dry they will get. There's no potential sap running out, no potential critters or bugs hiding in the branches – and every year it's perfectly shaped.

Dad would scout our timber throughout the year, looking for small evergreens that might become our Christmas tree. It was mid-December before he would cut the tree and bring it back to the house. Some years the tree would need to be trimmed down a bit, if Dad's eyes were a bit bigger than the space in the house. We didn't have a tree stand, so Mom would use an empty coffee can filled with dirt to hold the tree.

The first task every year was to untangle the lights and check them out. We had two strings of lights, and those were the times I came closest to hearing Mom use inappropriate words. Those of a “certain age” (that would be MY age!) remember the lights were all connected on a circuit. If one bulb was burned out, none of the bulbs would light.

We tried to always stay stocked up on extra Christmas bulbs. So Mom would start at one end of the string of lights, replacing one bulb at a time until the string would light up. She would then doublecheck the bulb removed to make sure it was burned out. Once in awhile the happy discovery was that a bulb was still good but had jiggled loose in the socket. The unhappy discovery would be that two or more bulbs in the string were burned out. That took forever to track down and remedy!

Once we got the bulbs working, we would put the lights on the tree. The lights always went first. Next was the tinsel garland, then the balls, bells, and such. Mom had metal icicles that came next – strips of metal that were spiral twisted, silver on one side and painted on the other. Those were neat icicles. Last were the regular icicles. Mom always preferred they were neatly placed over the branches of the tree. After a couple of minutes, I preferred to just toss them on so we were done! Mom's way, of course, was best.

Decorating that tree was always so much more fun than undecorating it. That meant the holidays were over for another long year. It seemed so long to wait. The pine needles were always so much more prickly when the decorations were being taken off. They fell and got everywhere. No matter how carefully we tried to take the icicles off the tree to be saved, it rarely worked – which is why Mom's way was best. I remember one year when I broke out after taking down the tree....we figured it was due to the dry pine needles, but we were never quite sure.

After the kids were born, I attempted to have a real tree a couple of times. I discovered I'd developed quite an allergy to them in the intervening years. It took a couple of years to realize that every time a real tree was put in the house, I started coughing and wheezing and would eventually lose my voice.

I miss the ambience of having a real tree, but I'm glad hubby is as happy with artificial trees as I am!