BRAVE NEUF WORLD: OH! Christmas Tree!

They just don’t make Christmas trees like they used to. They’re hardly any fun anymore.

Ken brought a Noble Fir home from the St. Albert the Great Church parking and tree lot on Saturday. He put it into the tree stand in the garage and left it there until Sunday to let gravity loosen up the branches and rain drops fall off. He hauled it in the front door and it hardly dropped a single needle. It only took a couple of turns of the tree stand screws to get it standing straight. It’s very symmetrical — every side is a good side. It is now occupying a corner of the living room stoically waiting for lights and decorations. It hasn’t even fallen over.

As I say, hardly any fun.

When we were kids, now THAT’S when Christmas trees were fun. Not one of them was ever symmetrical. My Dad brought home some of the worst looking trees you’ve ever seen. Every last one would have a huge bald spot with no branches. That’s the side that got shoved into the corner. But if there was more than one bald spot, this required cutting a branch and tying it on so that it looked more as if it was filled out. You could only put light-weight ornaments on these cantilevered limbs because if it was going to start leaning under the weight, it might just take the whole tree down with it. Where did these trees come from? Was Christmas tree farming that primitive in my youth? Didn’t anyone know about leaving space around the trees for even growth?

Anyway, the trees my Dad bought were also, consistently, too tall for our living room. Maybe there weren’t many different height choices in those days. Anyway, he’d haul it down to the basement and saw off a chunk of the trunk and haul the thing back upstairs. Showers of pine needles rained on the floor behind it. Branches whacked him in the face. Still too tall. So he’d haul it back down again. And up again. And it would still scrape the ceiling. So, down he’d go again, cursing this time. Sounds of cursing and sawing from the basement — cutting the silence, because by now we all knew we needed to keep our mouths shut. Back up to the living room. Still no room for the angel at the top. “DAD! Do we not have a tape measure?” My mother would go to the kitchen and stay out of it. This time, he’d take the hedge clippers to the top branches, hacking wildly to make room for the “Blanket-blank, bless-ed angel!!” See? Good times. Every year.

My parents never “sold out” and got an artificial tree, though. Our trees left a thick carpet of needles on the floor by January 1^st and we lived in constant tension that the 30 degree slant on the things was a sure indicator that they'd fall down any second. But, every year my mother would say, “Oh, Christmas just wouldn’t be the same without a real tree!” And so, that fresh piney smell and the sound of cursing and needles dropping would fill our home once again.

The most fun Ken and I have had with a Christmas tree was in 1980, the year we moved to Vancouver. In that environmentally-conscious city, we decided the responsible choice for Christmas décor would be a “live tree” – i.e., one that was rooted in a pot and that could be released into the wild once we had our holiday fill of it. We lived in a small apartment. So, it wasn’t a large tree, and the pot took up a bit too much room. But we felt good about this act of ecological heroism. Until one night, a few days into its stay, we were watching TV, all aglow with Christmas cheer, when we heard,

“Bzz.”

“Did you hear that?”

“What?”

“Bzz.”

“There it is again! Listen! A bzzing sound.”

“Bzz. Bzz. Bzz.”

“It’s coming from the tree.”

“No.”

“Yes! The tree is bzzzing.”

We crept closer.

“Bzzzz. Bzzzzz. Bzzzzzzzzz.”

“It’s alive! There are bees! Dozens of them. They’re waking up!!!!”

You’ve never seen anyone get a pair of gloves so fast in your whole life! Ken had that tree chucked out onto the balcony in seconds! That cured us of environmentally-motivated greenery selections. But we did laugh ourselves silly.

It will take us all week to decorate the tree we have this year, there are so many ornaments we’ve collected over the years. Each year, it’s such a treat to become reacquainted with them all, like they’re old friends.

We hope you are enjoying your own special magical moments this season, whether Christmas or Hanukkah or Bah-humbug-ing. It’s all good!