O #!%$@&*! Christmas Tree!
A Christmas-tree memory Scrooge would have loved.
Elsewhere in this issue, I write about the history of the Christmas tree and a local grower of live Christmas trees. I didn't have room in that story, however, for my own personal Christmas-tree history. This being the back page, towards which everything that didn't fit into the rest of the issue inexorably slides, where better to share my own holiday-tree reminiscences?
Don't worry, though–this story has plenty of violence, if not also the sex requisite for me to be able to sell the movie rights. While I have plenty of other warm and fuzzy Christmas memories suitable for Hallmark Hall of Fame adaptation, when the lens of my memories pans to the tree, it always zooms in on my father. Cursing.
I have mentioned in these pages before the gist of our annual Christmas-tree trauma: My father always struggled to wedge the blankety-blank tree into the blankety-blank stand. But allow me to elaborate, to flesh out that bare-bones portrait of my boyhood holiday angst. (It's not like you have anything else to do this time of year, like wrap presents.)
As a boy growing up in South Dakota, I loved Christmas. Oh, I know that all kids love Christmas–or, rather, they love the presents they get. But while possessing the normal avarice of any child who grew up in the tubercular-blue glow of the first great blossoming of television commercials, I loved not only the presents but all the trappings of Christmas. I savored each unfolding aspect of the holiday season that began with my making the obligatory pilgrim and turkey place cards for Thanksgiving dinner. (While obligatory, these were also as superfluous as a turkey's wattle: There were, after all, just three of us sitting down for the feast, and we always sat in the same places at the table.)
Come December, we would unpack the outdoor lights and wrap them around the metal post on the front porch and the big spruce tree in the front yard. (As that tree got bigger, we were able to wrap less and less of it without hauling out a ladder–and, as you'll see, my dad was not exactly the ladder-hauling sort.) Out would come the weird red-mesh miniature tree that my aunt, in her crafty period, had woven or sewn or, I dunno, grown in a lab and gifted us with. The white plastic holly with the red berry lights would be carefully curled in its place of honor atop the TV, then plugged in to make sure it had survived another year in the closet under the basement stairs.
Most important to this annual ritual was my marking of the toys I wanted in the Sears and Montgomery Ward Christmas catalogs. These would be painstakingly prioritized–so if, for instance, Santa could not bring me both the Authentic Western Town and the Junior Weather Station, the jolly old elf would know to opt for the metal version of Dodge City (which, inevitably, would also be the choice that would prove hardest for my parents to assemble late on Christmas Eve). I never questioned the connection between Santa and Sears or "Monkey" Ward; presumably it was some sort of subcontractor deal.
And then of course there was the Christmas tree itself. For some reason, it always fell to my mom and me to drive to the Christmas-tree lot and pick out a tree.
Given the troubles my dad inevitably encountered with the tree and the stand, you'd think he'd want some say in this selection. But no, I guess he had end-of-semester papers and tests to grade (being a college English teacher–though, come to think of it, so was my mom, so she too would have had grading to do). He'd be set up at that dining-room table with his grade book–an odd little spiral-bound thing clad in a heavy rough brown cardboard, as though prepared to take a beating–and a pile of blue themebooks, red pen scritch-scratching relentlessly at the inability of students to grasp the subtleties of Shakespeare. To protect the plastic tablecloth from red marks and for a firmer writing surface, he always worked on a flat wooden board with rounded corners, sort of like a lap desk without padding. These "grading boards," as I thought of them, were all over the house, in two shapes–square and rectangular; we still have a couple, rescued from my parents' house after my mom died.
So, as my dad graded papers deep into the gray winter afternoon, my mom and I would drive to the tree lot. The one I remember best was down the hill from the college where they taught, on a corner near the drugstore that was my parents' source of prescriptions and mine of comic books. (The drugstore–Lewis Drug–has since become a mini-chain, sort of a regional Walgreen's, and that original location has closed. In my early childhood, before we even had a mall, Lewis Drug and the nearby Sunshine Market grocery were the place we bought almost everything that didn't come from a catalog. Now there are multiple malls and "big box" stores, and Sioux Falls' population has doubled. I don't even think the ritzy new Lewis Drugs sell comic books anymore.)
The cut Christmas trees leaned against each other in bristling dark green rows. Overhead, holiday lights with bulbs as big as your thumb–this was before "mini" lights, much less fiber-optic-wired trees–illuminated the lot in that color that comes only from Christmas lights, which somehow glows red, orange and blue all at once. This being December in South Dakota, the ground would likely crunch with snow as well as pine needles. In my memories, it was always twilight when we went to the Christmas-tree lot, though my practical parents would actually have gone in mid-afternoon.
My mom and I prowled the lot in search of the perfect tree–no pathetic Charlie Brown trees for our family–making the sales attendant wrestle one after another from the rows for inspection. He'd grasp the trunk with a gloved hand and shake the tree a bit, twirling it so we could check the conformation. Finally, we made a selection, my mom paid, and the attendant would tie the tree in our car trunk, usually a foot or two protruding.
Driving out to some forest and cutting our own Christmas tree was never an option, both because of the lack of forests in the heart of the Great Plains (the best-looking evergreens for miles around were the ones my dad planted in our yard) and the inevitability of my dad doing himself–and perhaps innocent bystanders, as well–serious injury with a saw. Artificial trees, likewise, were out. "We don't do that," my mother might have said. But that was fine by me, as I loved the piney smell and rough feel of the real thing. I vaguely pitied friends who had plastic trees, and thought of those with white plastic trees as rubes right out of "The Beverly Hillbillies." (And flocked trees? Puh-lease. We definitely didn't do that.)
So every year the Fryxell family tree departed from a lot in the trunk of my mom's car–a two-tone blue Rambler–and every year the real Christmas adventure began when we got home. My dad's holiday job–whereas my mom did most of the decorating and shopping and all the cooking–was to prepare the tree for its entry into the house. Since "Channel 11 KELO-land News" filled the holidays with ghastly scenes of homes whose reckless owners had allowed their trees to dry out and burst into flames, step one was to cut a fresh slice off the bottom of the trunk, the better for it to suck up moisture.
This meant unearthing a saw from the dusty workbench in the garage that mostly served as storage for stray golf balls and tees. We owned two saws, neither of them anything a Texas serial killer would select for massacre duty. One was a plastic U shape whose ends held a rusty blade that looked borrowed from a discarded steak knife. The other, a traditional saw like those you'd see pictured on children's flashcards, had a rippling blade better suited for playing music than cutting anything.
My dad's pathetic tool collection and general lack of mechanical skills were not his fault. His father, my grandfather, worked with his hands all his life; the only thing I have of my grandfather's is a wooden chessboard and set of pieces he made. My dad and his siblings were the first generation to go to college. Either he or my grandfather, or both, decided early on that my dad would aspire to a life that didn't require working with his hands except to hold a pen or a piece of chalk. So he never learned how. (I inherited my dad's mechanical ineptitude, but I was smart enough to marry a spectacularly handy wife.)
Nonetheless, after much cursing–and, typically, application of one or more Band-Aids–my dad would saw a ragged round off the bottom of the trunk. It dropped at last to the driveway like a spent shell casing. Next came the moment of truth: Would the tree fit into the metal stand without further surgery?
Of course not! More tree surgery was inevitably required. Then the tree, wedged like a square peg into a round hole, wouldn't be straight. Out it came again for more hacking and cursing. A small pile of cigarette butts would by now have grown on the driveway where this gruesome operation was taking place, as my dad smoked his way through one attempt after another.
Somehow, eventually, the tree got into the stand in a position of adequate straightness (or my dad just gave up and let it lean). At last came the glorious moment where my dad and I brought the tree into the house: an initial explosion of needles at the front door, then a green trail across the entry and into the corner of the living room. My mom and I (later just me, once I could reach high enough) took over from here, stringing lights and hanging ornaments, while my dad retired to his armchair–weary but triumphant for another year–until martini time, 4:45 p.m. sharp.
You no doubt have your own Christmas-tree memories, which may not involve profanity, bloodshed, smoking or drinking. You're welcome to them; I wouldn't trade. After all, we did finally get the tree inside, where it filled our house with the smell of Christmas (and a spray of amputated needles). Christmas lights wove it with magic. Presents appeared in the mottled shadows of its branches. And on Christmas morning, nobody remembered what an ordeal it had been to get the tree in place, reasonably upright.
No, by Christmas morning my mom and dad were recalling instead the battle to assemble that damn Authentic Western Town.
Desert Exposure editor David A. Fryxell insists he's
been a good boy this
year.