O Christmas Tree!

We set up our Christmas tree today - it's a tiny decorative tree that my sister left behind when she moved away a couple of months ago. My daughters looped several glistening garlands and ribbons over it until the tree is no longer visible. It is a cone of shiny stuff and it is pretty cute. We were so delighted with it that we stood around it in a circle and clapped our hands.

This is my second Christmas tree of the year. My first tree was the library's entry in our town's Festival of Trees. It was a little "tree" constructed of books. Ginny Cameron, the children's librarian, and I built the tree in about 2 hours. Then we decorated it with paper letters decorated by children who visited the library. I placed a book about stars on the very top.
That tree gave me smiles for days.

(The link above will work for a short while till that web page picture is changed. In the meantime I will try to figure out how to put photos on the website....technology - not my strong suit.)

There have been other memorable Christmas trees in my life. Growing up, our trees were typical middle class trees of the 1950s and 60s. All the neighbors had similar trees with similar decorations. There is comfort in that. But in the late 60s my mother suddenly took control of The Christmas Tree. Maybe she had just been waiting for her clumsy little kids to become responsible big kids, waiting for a chance to have the tree she'd always wanted, Christmas trees like those in the women's magazines. I don't know, we never discussed it. But when I was twelve my mother's inner decorator emerged and from then on, I didn't participate in the decoration of the tree. We had small flocked trees with shiny blue glass ornaments, tall noble firs with shiny blue glass ornaments, 10 foot tall bushy trees with shiny gold glass ornaments, fat trees embellished with gold garlands criss crossed just so. My mother invested a lot of herself in her trees, which is why it is too bad I found them completely boring.

My first tree as an adult was a little scraggly thing my boyfriend and I bought for a few bucks. We made ornaments out of salt dough. We loved our tree.

Many years later when I moved to Iowa I was unprepared for the Iowa Christmas tree culture. In California we set up our (real) trees a week or so before Christmas, took them down by New Year's Day at the latest. In Iowa it is not surprising to see Christmas trees glowing through windows before Thanksgiving Day. A lot of Iowans use artificial trees. A lot of them. Before I moved to Iowa the only person I'd ever met who owned an artificial Christmas tree was my grandmother, who had an all aluminum tree in 1962. An all aluminum tree is the only artificial tree I'm interested in. I don't understand the point of having an artificial tree that looks like a real tree. If you're going to have a fake tree, go all the way fake is my way of looking at it, I mean, have fun with it, go glitzy. (Iowans also use plastic eggs at Easter, which I just can't get used to.) So my first Christmas in Iowa I behaved like a Californian and waited until a week before Christmas to purchase my real tree. But they were all sold. I couldn't believe it. No Christmas trees? A couple of days before Christmas a new supply of trees arrived, so we were spared a treeless Christmas.

The following year I was determined not to repeat my mistake. We bought a tree very early, but we didn't want it to dry out and get all brown and bare limbed naked before Christmas, so we stowed the tree outside, leaning against the garage, out in the cold where it would stay fresh and fragrant. And the day my husband went to retrieve the tree and bring it in for decoration, we discovered just how fragrant that tree was. Did I mention that our neighborhood was home to about three dozen feral cats? Later that day the city manager was startled when he drove by the city street shop where my husband worked, and saw my husband hosing down a Christmas tree with the power washer used to clean garbage trucks. It almost worked. The tree released a sort of piney scent, delicately layered with eau de Tom.

Then there was the year Pat thought he would trim the tree just a little bit. He took the tree into the basement and soon the buzz of his little power saw came zipping up the stairs, followed by silence, followed by "whoops." I peeked downstairs to see the basement floor completely carpeted by pieces of pine branches. My husband gazed up at me and blinked. "The trunk had a fork," he said. We had just a little tree that year - we stuck one of the branches in a coffee can and set it up on a cabinet. I wound the other branches around a wire and made a lopsided wreath.

My Christmas trees are never magazine trees, they are family trees, and they are always loved.

Have a joyful and peaceful Christmas.