The Boy Who Loved his Christmas Tree

 

December 2, 2022

Advent Calendar December 2: The Boy who Loved his Christmas Tree

When I was a little boy, back in the early 1970s I lived with my family in Watertown NY in a green house on High Street. At Christmas time, we always got excited when it was time to put up the Christmas tree which usually went up on a Saturday about two weeks from Christmas. Wow, was that a special day. On the appointed Saturday we’d have a big breakfast and then dad would tell my big brother John to go up to the attic and start pulling down the decorations. Down he came with the artificial tree in a box and my twin sister and I would follow with the lights, ornaments and other Christmas related decorations. I can’t tell you how amazingly exciting this was for me. Our tree was a 7 foot artificial that consisted of individual branches with colored stems that matched the colored holes in the tree base. Blue stems into blue holes, red stems in red holes. Pretty low tech. Lights were old school bulbs that got hot to the touch and my brother was responsible for sorting and untangling all those old bulbs and figuring out the one bad bulb that kept the rest of the strand from working. There was often some cuss words that accompanied that chore, though John was good at keeping mom from hearing the results of his frustration. Once the tree was up, the lights went on and the we would start putting on the ornaments. We had a lot of ornaments that came from Germany that dad had bought when he was stationed there in the 1960s. They were beautiful but real fragile. Every year we lose one or two of these, which made me sad. The one thing that my mom was responsible for was placing the icicles on after we had placed all the bulbs on and turned on the lights. The icicles were thin silver tinsel which mom placed strand by strand on each branch. No grabbing a fist full and throwing them on the tree like some folks did. Mom did it one strand at a time. And it took forever. But it was beautiful when it was all done. And for the next 3 weeks, this was the centerpiece of our living room. Day by day , as we approached Christmas pretty packages soon began appearing under the tree until Christmas morning when the tree looked like it was literally sprouting from the Christmas present mountain. But Christmas came and went and the saddest day was always January 2nd, when we took down the tree and all the rest of the Christmas decorations. The tinsel and ornaments came off first and then the lights, and then finally the branches came out of the base and placed in the tree box. I was a weird kid. And I remember that as I was re-boxing the ornaments and the tree branches I felt the need to kiss every ornament and each branch before placing them in their boxes. See you next year old tree! 11 months until we see you again. Of course I did this discretely not wanting my brother or dad to make fun of me. They didn’t understand how much I loved Christmas. And they’d never understand how much I truly loved this tree.