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Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree,
How Shiny Are Your Branches?
by C.L. Halvorson
Christmastime in our childhood home was
a very special time of year. Mama loved Christmas. She would have left
the tree up all year if she felt she could; however she was also
terribly superstitious. She firmly believed, that to ensure good luck
in the coming year, the Christmas tree had to go up on Thanksgiving and
come down on New Year’s Day. This issue was absolutely non-negotiable.
So every year, after driving two hours
up to our grandparents’ house and another two hours back, out would come
our family’s silver-colored aluminum Christmas tree. That’s right, no
matter how many times you read it, it will still say “silver-colored
aluminum Christmas tree.”
It came complete with your standard
Christmas tree pole that closely resembled a closet bar that a monkey
went at with a drill. The pole slid into your standard Christmas tree
stand and then promptly fell over. The pole then slid back into
your standard Christmas tree stand, which your standard Daddy would then
drive seventeen 6-inch screws into to hold it in place, and then it
promptly fell over.
Your standard Daddy would then shout
some very un-Christmas-like words at no one in particular and
forcefully screw your standard Christmas tree pole in your standard
Christmas tree stand into the floor. After this he would stomp to the
kitchen and grab your standard can of Schlitz, flop down on his recliner
and announce that he had done his part and someone else could do the
rest.
This is where Mama took over. She
reached into the box and pulled out two dozen or so long thin cardboard
tubes. These tubes housed the branches. Your standard artificial
Christmas tree is equipped with green-colored plastic branches that some
worker has painstakingly crafted to closely resemble actual evergreen
tree branches. This was not the case with the manufacturers of the
silver-colored aluminum Christmas tree.
Mama worked her fingers into the end of
one tube, grasped the end of the branch and –ZING—out popped what
can only be described as a metal rod which was adorned with short pieces
of rigid silver tinsel used to represent the needles of an evergreen.
The tubes these things came in were no more than half an inch in
diameter but the extracted branch, properly fluffed, grew to at least
three inches across. Technology is an amazing thing!
The branches were all color coded by
little dabs of paint at each end that corresponded to little dabs of
paint on the holes of the pole. This was a good thing as it would be
mighty difficult to find a live model at that time of night or any other
time for that matter.
After a while, Mama stepped back to
admire her work. There it stood with all the grandeur it could muster
for being only four feet tall and constructed of shiny silver aluminum.
Mama unpacked the tree skirt made of white felt and decorated with
shapes made from glue and glitter. She wrapped it around the base of
the tree to hide the stand and seventeen 6-inch screws.
Now, it was time for my sisters and me
to join in for the decorating. We had a wide variety to choose from.
There were pretty glass bulbs in green, red and gold that Mama herself
would hang. There was the balsa wood do-it-yourself ornament set that
we got at the five and dime. We painted and glittered those the year
before. The camel was my favorite. There were the little snowmen made
with Lifesavers as their body that Mama wouldn’t let us eat. Of course,
there was the 12 inch snowman I had made in the first grade that nearly
covered one side of the tree on its own. Stars and trees and Santas cut
from paper and decorated with crayons and more glitter. That garland
made of construction paper loops was an absolute must. Of course, there
was the ever popular 347 metric tons of tinsel of which more ended up on
the floor and the cat than on the tree, but it didn’t matter.
Mama placed the star on top when we were
finished. Daddy, who had been watching with a funny but nice look in
his eye, would then crawl behind the tree and add the final element.
Electric string lights on this tree were a very bad idea. We tried one
year but we all got sunburns from the glare. So we had this contraption
that was basically a disc sectioned off into quarters. Each section was
a different color, red, green, blue or yellow. This attached to a base
that had a light bulb screwed into it. The disc revolved slowly and
cast colored light onto the tree in place of string lights.
We stepped back to admire our
handiwork. It was truly the most god-awful thing you ever saw. But it
was beautiful to us. At least you couldn’t see the tree anymore for all
the decorations. Then we sat around the living room to admire the tree,
drink hot cocoa and listen to Bing Crosby sing Christmas carols on the
record player.
Diana then looked at Mama and Daddy and
uttered the nine little words that truly start the Christmas season,
“So, when are going to go see Santa
Claus?”
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