O, Tannenbaum

My dad grew up in the early 1900’s on a farm in southern Wisconsin. There was neither money nor time for Christmas decorating. There were chickens to feed. Cows that had to be milked. Every day. Farm life offered no time off from chores and probably still doesn’t. In lieu of a Christmas tree, his mother would cut a large branch from a pine tree, prop it in a corner and call it good. Over the years my husband’s and my Christmas trees have come from a variety of places. Tree lots where the profits went to an organization or tree farms where we cut our own tree. One year it was incredibly cold and there lay my husband, sawing away on his back on the freezing ground under a tree with an unusually thick trunk. I thought he might have to stay there until spring. After that we looked first and foremost for varieties with slender trunks. Another year we were at the same tree farm but it was pouring rain. Only one of our sons was game to go along to get a tree and we chose a huge Concolor Fir. It stayed so fresh and supple, I bet we could’ve left it up until Easter. In fact, in my hometown there was a family who was known to do just that. When we lived on the Outer Banks of North Carolina we learned that the local custom was to use one of the island’s many cedar trees for the holiday. It was beautiful and smelled great but I was so allergic to it that I think I probably lobbied for it to come down the day after Christmas. When I was growing up, Christmas in northern Wisconsin was always snowy. My dad’s brother, my Uncle Walter, tramped through the deep snow in the Nicolet National Forest to cut a Christmas tree for us each year when he went out to get one for his family. I’m not sure we were grateful enough for that act of kindness. We put our tree up here in our house the other day. We are some of the few people I know who still have a real tree. I strung the lights, then added ornaments. A few ornaments were my mother’s. Some are ones our kids made in elementary school. Some are representative of the places we’ve lived. Two were freebies from different Chinese restaurants. One is a Santa made of shells that a friend brought us after a Hawaiian vacation. A lot of people say they don’t like the mess from a real tree and all the work it takes. Those things are all true. But I continue to be a sucker for the real thing, at least for one more year.

Photo courtesy of Me: Our actual tree this year