Editor’s note: This column was first published in the Daily Journal.
Every Christmas my father brought home a perfect Christmas tree.
As a small child I would lie on the floor with my head stuck under the tree and marvel at the colored lights and sparkling ornaments. I assumed each tree had been made personally by God, since no human could have created such a wonder.
Later I would learn that Dad actually bought the trees from the Hope Lion’s Club in the parking lot at Norman Funeral Home on the town square. Nonetheless, they were perfect, real trees that dripped sap on the floor and smelled like Mom’s Pine-Sol cleaner.
And they were huge. My sister, Linda, insisted a real Christmas tree had to reach the ceiling of our living room — and they would have, if Dad hadn’t always had to cut off several pieces of the trunks trying to get them to stand sort of straight.
Those trees — complete with bald spots that had to be turned to the wall and needles that dried up and began to litter the floor long before New Year’ Day — came to represent all that was warm and fuzzy about the holiday season.
Even after I grew up, married and had two children of my own, the nostalgic image of a perfect tree from the funeral home parking lot remained a symbol of a perfect Christmas for me.
Unfortunately, my chosen career did not allow me to live just a few blocks from the Hope town square. Journalism turned out to be a low-paying, nomadic profession that took me to four different jobs in four different cities in the span of 10 years. Our family lived in a series of rental properties — chosen for their low rents rather than comfort.
With two toddlers in the house, fresh-cut Christmas trees were too expensive for our budget. They also posed a fire hazard, since we lived in some homes that might not pass an inspection by the fire marshal.
All of that led to a trip to Sears, where we paid $14.95 — on sale, half-price — for a plastic, tree-like thing. The best I can say about this tree is that it leaned slightly to one side, as if Dad had been sawing around on the trunk.
The first year we put up the plastic tree we had quite a collection of equally bad decorations. The lights were ones my mother had discarded. We did not have an ornament for the top of the tree, so the children and I made a star out of a piece of cardboard and put some tin foil on it.
We strung popcorn to use as garlands and bought a few gaudy do-dads to hang here and there on the branches. The children got busy with crayons and construction paper to add their touch.
That’s the way things went for the next seven Christmases.
Eventually, my career did not turn out to be a complete financial disaster after all, and we were able to buy a house. Along with the house came a time when we would at last be able to have a real Christmas tree with real ornaments.
So in 1982, Ann and I surprised our children — Wes, 12, and Rachel, 10 — with a real Christmas tree. We got it at the K-Mart parking lot in Greenwood rather than Norman Funeral Home, but it was in every other way real — including a crooked trunk, bald spots and dripping sap.
We set it up in the corner of the living room and called the children to help us begin stringing the new lights. I anticipated the joy that would spread across their little deprived faces as they gazed at the wonder before them.
“What is that?” asked Rachel. “Where is the real tree?”
“This is a REAL tree,” I told her. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“No, I mean, where is OUR real tree?” she screamed, breaking into tears and falling to the floor on her knees. “That isn’t OUR real tree. I want OUR tree.”
So later that night, we dragged the dog-eared cardboard box containing the old plastic, bottle-brush tree out of the attic and set it up, complete with the ornaments made by the children over eight years of misguided Sunday school art projects.
Then I sat down and wrote Rachel a song to the tune of White Christmas:
“I’m dreaming of a plastic Christmas,
Just like the ones I’ve always seen,
Where the trees, all molded,
Out of boxes unfolded,
And smelled like polyethylene.”
Rachel didn’t get the humor, but I got her point. Christmas is not about the kind of tree you put in the corner of the room.
It is about the memories of the love you have shared around the tree.
Bud Herron is a retired editor and newspaper publisher who lives in Columbus. He served as publisher of The Republic from 1998 to 2007. Contact him at [email protected].
