It’s the holiday season, time to sing “O Tannenbaum”—a 16th-c. German folk song, when the fir tree was a symbol of faithfulness. And if it’s your family tradition, you’ve been faithful about putting one up in some corner of your house every year.
Of course, with that effort come priceless memories. As a teenager, I remember the year my mother got sick of the same-old same-old, so she and I spray-painted our tree white and hung it with red velvet poinsettias. Sensational, what? Not so, said my furious father and brothers, who sulked every time they walked by the thing.
When Jack and I moved to Riverside, we took to buying balled trees we could plant in our yard later. With all that dirt, they weighed a ton; but once in the family room, we dropped the tree into a big metal washtub at such an angle that it got stuck like that. So, Jack tied a rope around the top of the tree, led it through a hook he’d drilled into a beam in the ceiling and figured if he stood far enough away, he could pull it upright. Just then, a sailing buddy we’d invited for dinner walked through the door, took one look and said: “Gee, I’ve never seen a gaff-rigged Christmas tree before!”
When our son Jonathan was about two, he ran toward the tree in his Dr. Denton’s and threw himself bodily into the mound of gifts underneath. Jack’s mother from Philadelphia was not amused, but I could totally identify. It would be like swimming in a pool of Champagne.
There was the year that the kids and I baked gingerbread men and hung them all over the tree with a little red ribbon on each hook. But the next morning, all that was left was a bunch of heads. Our golden retriever Charlie had eaten them up to their necks, cleverly leaving the ribbons and hooks intact.
Then there were the Meadowlarks’ progressive dinner parties on Meadow Road on New Year’s Eve. The best part came when we performed “afterglow” skits and stunts. The most daring? When the gents (in black tie) ran and slid on their knees across the polished wood floor of the Hornadays’ living room to see who could come closest to the Christmas tree without knocking it down.
Long ago, I gave up buying trees at the Junior League Enchanted Forest, choosing to make a donation instead. The first reason: I stopped bidding on a tree because some guy convinced me it would be perfect to cheer up his poor, old, sick mother, only to be told later he didn’t have a sick mother, and the tree was sitting proudly in his foyer.
Capping that, I wanted to buy two little three-foot trees—one for my front hall and one for my newlywed daughter, Audrey. But every time I’d write my name on the silent auction forms, a kid would run over and sign his mother’s name after mine. Later, I saw the lady drive off in a pickup truck full of trees. She was a decorator from New York.
But Christmas trees also bring out the best in people. Cristin Marandino recalls the time their huge tree fell over, and her mother managed to con a FedEx driver into putting it up again. And I’m ever grateful to everyone who brought us their old Christmas trees in January to create a twinkling border outside the tent in our backyard for our daughter’s wedding.
Finally, when Audrey came over to help me put my tree on top of the car to recycle a while back, she asked: “Why are you taking it to Todd’s Point? My goats would love it!”
“You’re kidding,” I said in disbelief. “Baby and Gimpy would eat that thing?”
“Down to the last needle,” she replied. “It may take them a few months, but they will.”
And they did.