1. The cutting of the tree. We'd all stomp around in the snow looking for "the one." Not too fat, not too tall, not too crooked, not too small. Most of the time, we'd find the perfect tree, and start screaming to our parents to come and look. Five minutes later, when my mother and father concluded their quarter mile hike through muddy tractor ruts to get where we were, the conversation that followed usually went like this:
"Dad! Dad! Let's get this one! Can we get this one? It's perfect! It's just the right size! Can we? Huh? Can we? Huh? Huh? Let's get this one!"
"You see that red tag that says "Sold?" my father would ask.
"Yeah, we see it," we'd reply.
"Do you know what SOLD means? That means somebody already bought it. IT'S SOLD."
"Ohhhhhhhhh."
And then we'd run off to find the next perfect tree, which didn't have a Sold tag, but *did* have a piece of red ribbon, which after another quarter mile hike by my parents, we found out meant the same thing. What a gyp, as we used to say. We would do this for approximately 18 hours, or until my father just chopped down the one closest to the car. For some reason, it seemed like we always did this during the worst possible weather. Looking back on it now, I think that was my father's way of avoiding the crowds.
2. The tying of the tree to the vehicle. If there was one thing my father always had an abundance of, it was rope. He would tie that tree to the car so tight it became one with the car. My mother always had nightmares of losing a tree on the highway, so he did his best to try to reassure her. Plus, he really liked rope. Which was a shame, because most of the time it by the time we got the tree home, the knots would frozen solid, and he'd spend another 30 minutes trying to untie the knots so he didn't ruin the rope. In the end he would almost always end up cutting the tree from the car like he was a surgeon cutting out a cancerous mole, and the car would end up with approximately 3,000 little dreadlocks hanging off the sides of the luggage rack.
3. The carving of the stump. 9 times out of ten, the tree ended up being too big for the shitty tree stand we had. That meant he had to whittle it down with the chain saw and chisels, which was pretty fun to watch, and listen to, if you liked to learn new and interesting swear words. By the time he was done cutting and chopping and whittling, the base of the tree looked like a chewed and freshly sharpened pencil. As a result of this butchery, the bottom third of the branches were either intentionally or unintentionally trimmed off. This is a good representative image:
But it fit in the stand and that's all that counted.
4. The dragging of the tree. For some reason, due to the design of the house I grew up in, it was necessary to drag the tree across every single carpeted surface in the place to get it to the living room. This resulted in pine needles being permanently embedded in the carpet for the next 12 months. My mother loved this. Between the needles and the sap, she was a wreck. It got so bad that she used to just go outside and chainsmoke cigarettes until my father was done. And if you think that sounds bad, you should have seen it at the end of January when the tree was dry as dust and had to get dragged out again.
By the time we moved out when I was in high school, a good archeologist could have accurately dated our house by the layers of pine needles in the rug. Our first house had a vaulted ceiling so the trees were generally huge. Big ladders, eyebolts and cables were almost always involved. When we moved into a larger house with normal 8 ft. ceilings, it took us a while to adjust. The first couple of years we would bring home a tree that looked small outside, but ended up being HUGE when it was finally dragged into the living room.
When my father attempted to stand it upright, it would invariably be about 2 feet too tall, and it would make a huge scrape mark across the ceiling. My father would grab the shears and be back at that tree like Edward Scissorhands -- chopping an extra two feet off the top so that it didn't hit the ceiling anymore. Picture a flat top haircut made of evergreen branches and you've nailed it.
5. The stringing of the lights. This always started with "testing." Each string would be plugged in, and searched for burnt bulbs. Somehow, during the last 11 months in storage, approximately 25% of all the bulbs turned to shit. The thing is, with the old bulbs, you had no way of knowing which bulb in the string was the culprit. If one bulb was bad, the whole string was out. The trick was to find the bad bulb. You would do this with a "known good" bulb -- by swapping it out with the bulbs that "looked bad," you would hopefully hit the right one and the string would jump to life. Of course, you were totally screwed if you had more than one bad bulb in the string, which was usually the case. After that, you had no real choice but to use one of those window candles with a single socket and test every single bulb.
Eventually, we would even hit the shoebox, which is where we stored all the "old bulbs" -- the ones that still lit up but had the color flaking off the outside. (An aside about the bulbs: My mother was nothing if not a follower of Christmas bulb fads. Whatever bulb was hot the previous year, that's what we had. She would buy them the week after Christmas for half price. We had giant bulbs that looked like colored rock candy, we had spinners that used the heat from the bulb to spin a propeller, we had bubble lights, elf faces, blinkers, pastels, ones that were supposed to look like flickery candles but just looked like they were shorting out -- you name it and at one time, we had it. )
My father hated all of them equally. But he had reserved a special spot in hell for the old lights. Because these were inherited from my grandmother, they got hot. Really, really hot. So hot they had a little scalloped metal pie plate thing around the back side of the bulb in an attempt to limit its contact with flammable things that might spontaneously ignite, such as arm hair or pine needles. The fun part about these lights was that my mother always wanted him to string them while they were lit. Obviously, being a logical and practical guy, he always wanted to simply test the string, put them on the tree and THEN plug them in. Unfortunately, it seemed like every time he took that approach, invariably only half the lights would come on due to some light getting jostled enough to fail. Then it would be a "swap and replace" all the way down the line to find the bad bulb, which was much more of a pain when the lights were already on the tree. Because of this complication happening more than once, eventually my mother always got her way, which meant that my father used to burn himself pretty regularly during this exercise. I can say with complete authority that most of the bad words I learned in my life I heard for the first time while watching my father put up a Christmas tree.
6. The Balls. Every year, my mother would decide whether or not to bring out the "new balls." These were the ones purchased on December 27th of the previous year. We kids, of course, all wanted the new balls. Add the new ones to the huge pile of old crappy ones that had the color coming off the outside, plus all the crap decorations we made in school -- and you had quite a pile. Of course, everything we had went on. Usually after the first couple of boxes, we'd run out of those little hooks and start using paper clips. My mother and father would hit the high branches, and us kids would hit what was left of the low branches. Since we all immediately grabbed the NEW balls, every branch below the 4 foot mark looked like this:
Now cover that already straining branch in tinsel and another pound of miscellaneous crap passing itself off as "ornaments" and you will come close to picturing an average Christmas tree at my house when we were growing up.
The ultimate psychedelic Christmas tree had to belong to my Grandmother. It's a shame I don't have any pictures of it, and it's also a shame I was never into weed, because this tree would have been the ultimate trip. It was an artificial tree, made completely out of aluminum. It had blue-chrome balls on it, and it was in a base that slowly rotated it around. On the floor next to it was a spotlight with a color wheel that would slowly cycle between red, blue and green. You could also replace the gels if you wanted it to just cycle through two colors. It looked like this:
I would stare at that thing for hours, all the while listening to the rrrrr-rrrrrr-rrrrr sound of the chicken routisserie motor turning the thing around and around and around. It was truly mesmerizing. The funniest thing about the tree was that it would periodically "eat" the tree skirt -- and you would go look at the tree and the skirt would be all wound up on the stem, spinning slowly along with the tree.
The only bad thing about these trees (well, ok -- not even close to the only bad thing, but one of the worst things) was that if your house was dry, and carpeted, and you happened to have shoes on, this tree would "reach out and touch you" if you walked too close to it. The first time my little brother caught a 4-inch long static electricity lightning bolt to the back of his head was also the last time. We all learned to respect the tree.
I recently found out you can still find old ones, but they're pretty collectible. I saw one the other day on an antiques site for $695, but I can't see spending that kind of cash to get voluntarily electrocuted.
This post brought back a lot of memories, and it kinda explains why my Christmas tree for the last ten years has been covered in an odd assortment of Star Trek ships, miscellaneous Super Heros, tiny backpacking equipment and ugly, gay elves. This year, we decided to class it up a notch, and do a more traditional tree. Here's a pic:
It doesn't spin, and it's not made of metal, but it'll do.
Peace.
