One of the Christmas traditions I’ve enjoyed the most throughout the years is decorating the Christmas tree.
When I was a kid, my mom and I would go to a tree lot and pick out a “perfect” one, then Dad would come home from work and set it up. Mom and I then would spend the evening meticulously decorating it. My mother had a degree in art, so believe me, the tree had to look worthy of a museum display. Every ornament had to be exactly the same distance from the end of each branch, and any crooked tinsel just about caused a coronary. But I still enjoyed every minute of decorating. I also loved the smell of a freshly cut tree because it gave the house that true Christmassy scent.
In my family, “artificial” was a four-letter word when it came to Christmas trees. My mother considered them to be an insult to the word “tree,” even a sacrilege. The shiny silver ones that were all the rage back when I was a kid did not, in my mother’s opinion, bear any resemblance whatsoever to an actual tree…unless maybe you were an alien from the planet Zebulon. In fact, she had a theory the trees originally were created in an attempt to recycle all of the discarded aluminum foil that people used when roasting their Thanksgiving turkeys...because once all of that fire-resistant foil reached the town dump, it couldn't be incinerated.
So just about every Christmas over the years, I’ve had a real tree. I must confess however, that in the late 1990s I did lapse for a while when I gave in to all of the excitement over the new fiber-optic Christmas trees with built-in, color-changing lights in their branches. I couldn’t wait to buy one.
Ours was stunning, especially on its built-in rotating base…until the base started making noises similar to those of a race car grinding its gears. That’s when “Peace on Earth” took on a whole new meaning. The fiber-optic tree is now resting in peace with my spiders in the basement.
I still can remember when $5-$10 would buy a live Christmas tree that rivaled the one at Rockefeller Center. And I also remember the first time my husband and I went to a tree farm to chop down our own tree and were shocked when it cost us an "outrageous" $20.
Nowadays, $20 won’t even buy a Christmas branch. In fact, one of my friends spent close to $100 for a real six-foot tree only two years ago. The thought of paying that much for something that’s a needle-shedding fire hazard that will be brown and bald within two weeks has forced me to scout out trees on my own land instead of purchasing one.
Besides that, I'm cheap.
Unfortunately, although I own nearly eight acres of woodland, finding anything that closely resembles the shape of a Christmas tree is rare. That’s because I have very few fir trees. But I have loads of these weird-looking pine trees that all have nice full branches at the bottom, then halfway up they have an area about two-feet long or more with no branches at all. I don’t know if it’s hereditary, if it’s just the specific type of tree they are, or if they’re all victims of some sort of strange pine-tree balding affliction, but there’s no chance any one of them ever will become finalists in a “prettiest Christmas tree” contest.
Still, I suppose I have to take into consideration they’re free, so I’m getting what I pay for.
Every year I usually scope out a tree on my land far in advance of Christmas, like in June, and then I keep a close eye on it all year until mid-December…when I chop it down.
I actually had a row of four decently shaped pine trees growing along the road in front of my house. They were only about six-feet tall and although not as full as I’d have liked, they at least didn’t have the typical bald areas on them. So I was certain I’d be all set for Christmas trees for the next four years.
But then the town decided to clear away all of the trees and bushes along both sides of my road. And in the blink of an eye, my precious trees were reduced to piles of wood chips. I was so devastated when I saw their remains, I still refer to the incident as “Pine-pocalypse.”
It took a lot of tromping through the woods and becoming intimately acquainted with every species of tick in New Hampshire before I finally found another tree that might be suitable for Christmas. It was barely five feet tall but full, and I imagined it would look much nicer once decorated. So I kept a close watch on it, making certain no birds sat on it (or worse), no squirrels climbed it, and no deer nibbled on it.
Then the drought struck. And by September the tree had turned a lovely orange-yellow color from top to bottom. There wasn’t even one green needle left on it.
Did the other trees surrounding it look the same way?
No, of course not. That would make too much sense.
So I guess it’s time to venture down into the basement and dig out the old fiber-optic tree (if the spiders will allow it) and see if it will respond to CPR. I figure I always can drown out the grinding noises the base makes if I crank up the Christmas carols to about 120 decibels.
Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines all of her adult life. She is the author of several novels in a variety of genres, from humor and romance to science-fiction. Contact her at: sillysally@att.net.
