In honor of the Christmas holidays, I am once again reflecting on our childhood Christmases!
Of all memories stored away in our brains, what can be more special and wonderful than memories of our childhood Christmases? I grew up in Texas in the fifties, two unrelated but equally spectacular feats. My parents moved us, me and my little sister, to Texas from Long Island when I was seven. We were the dreaded (and often fighting) word—YANKEES! As I grew older and more mature, or perhaps as I began to acquire somewhat of a Texas drawl, the Yankee comments began to dwindle, and I actually began to identify myself as a Texan. Children are very amazing when it comes to fitting in.
My parents made all holidays special ones, but at Christmas they really pulled out all the stops. Across the brown, dusty lawns and homes of Dallas, outside lights, decorations, and Christmas trees went up the day after Thanksgiving and returned to their boxes in the attic the day after Christmas, with the now dried out and shedding fir lying on the curb awaiting the trash pickup. My family was different. They looked at the rush to put trees up with disdain as if Christmas itself were being compromised. In keeping with my parents’ German and English heritage, our tree went up on Christmas Eve and stayed up at least until twelfth night, and often longer. In fact, the sudden arrival of the Christmas Tree was accomplished not by Mom and Daddy, but by the Big Man himself. Yes, our tree was decorated by Santa!
Imagine if you can, the excitement and wonder of a small child heading off to bed on Christmas Eve with a naked fir tree sitting in the living room and awaking to a fully decorated tree with presents and toys surrounding it. Another slight difference with our southern neighbors was the lavishness of the tree itself. Decorating the tree was not a casual hanging a few ornaments and lights, it was a work of art right up there with the Sistine Chapel—and often taking nearly as long to accomplish! Today, as a dedicated lover of Christmas, I compromise between the two traditions; we generally put up our trees Thanksgiving weekend and leave them up until around mid January. Of course, my artificial trees need no water and don’t shed needles all over the carpets. In keeping with today’s more elaborate decorating approaches, we have a “traditional” tree and a southwest tree, not the single lovely focal point of my childhood.
Selecting the tree was a feat unto itself. A week or two before Christmas, the four of us would make the rounds of what seemed to be every Christmas tree lot in Dallas looking for the tallest and fullest tree to be found. Luckily our old rented farmhouse had tall ceilings; even so our tree usually appeared to have grown right into the ceiling, so we never had the tradition of a star or angle topping the tree; they would have had to sit in lonely splendor in the attic! After traipsing around multiple tree lots, my sister and I grew progressively less picky. Not my father; the search continued until we found the perfect tree or rather the almost perfect tree. Since Nature herself could not seem to produce quite the tree Daddy envisioned, she had to be helped along. Once he selected the main tree, he would select another less perfect specimen of the same variety as the first. At last we headed home with our hard found booty
Once we arrived at home, the trunks of both trees—the full bosomy one and her scrawnier little sister—were trimmed off a little, and they were left to stand in buckets of water outside the house, not in ordinary buckets of water, mind you, but in a concoction of sugar water and other secret ingredients known only to my father. A day or two before Christmas, we began the ritual of getting ready to decorate the tree. The prime tree was brought into the house first, placed in the stand, and then put upon a device known as the platform. The platform was a 4 x 8 foot sheet of plywood which rested upon four 12” sawhorses. The tree was then placed in the center of the platform with its top branches trying their best to break through the ceiling. Grudgingly, Daddy would trim minimal branches from the top, just to allow the tree to stand upright with the top branches spreading out around the ceiling.
Next both Mother and Daddy would examine the tree critically, noting every place where a more aesthetic Mother Nature should have placed a branch. What she couldn’t do properly, Daddy could! Armed with a drill, he drilled holes into every spot what a more competent Mother Nature would have put a bough. Then the other little tree’s branches were cut off and inserted into the holes in the trunk until voilá, the perfect tree emerged! The remaining branches from the second tree were used to decorate the mantle over the fireplace and make countless other kinds of Christmas centerpieces and decorations.
Now, the lights could be put on before Santa came to finish the job. With his busy schedule on Christmas Eve, I suspect he appreciated the help. In those days there were no little twinkle lights or LED’s. It was strictly the strings of old screw-in bulbs. Even the lights were a production at our house! I don’t know how many strings of lights the average household in Texas used in those days, but take that number and triple or quadruple it, and you begin to get the idea. Lights on the tree, now it was time to rearrange the bulbs by color. “Harve, there are two red ones right next to each other,” my Mother would say of “We need a green one over there,” and on and on. At long last the light bulbs were arranged and rearranged to their satisfaction. Suzanne and I didn’t take a very active part in the lighting process; we were just happy to lie on the floor and gaze rapturously at the tree which was slowly being transformed into an object of wonder and delight.
© 2015, Black Dirt and Sunflowers
