Oh, Christmas Tree: Six (Plus) Short Seasonal Stories

by Allison Howard, Barbara Lambert, Cheryl Andrews, Carin Makuz, Elizabeth Yeoman, and Allyson Latta

(Click above links for their Christmas Wordless Wednesday photos.)

The best-kept secret about my Wordless Wednesday photography group is that behind the scenes, the six of us aren’t wordless at all. In fact, we’re downright chatty. Most weeks the photos we post generate a flurry of storytelling among us. The subjects range widely (and wildly) from week to week, and sometimes flow seamlessly into Thursday and beyond.

When the topic turned to fondly remembered Christmas trees, I asked the other five “Click Chicks” (as we’ve dubbed ourselves) if they’d allow me to share their stories here. To my delight they said yes. I hope you’ll enjoy theirs, as I have, and mine as well.

 

Swiss Christmas Spirit

by Allison Howard

While living briefly in Germany in the early 1970s, my friend Peggy and I received an invitation to spend Christmas in Switzerland. Peggy’s friend Bert, who lived in the same small town in B.C. that we came from, planned to travel to his family home for the holidays and invited us, along with another friend, Tom, to join him. When I think of it now, it’s amazing that Bert could turn up for Christmas with three friends, strangers to his family, and that we’d be so completely welcomed by his large clan.

We took the train to the small village in Switzerland, where Bert’s parents, cousins, aunts, and uncles, and many siblings welcomed us as though we’d always known them. Massive meals seemed to appear out of nowhere and were served on a beautifully set and decorated table. We were also frequently invited to the homes of their friends and treated to their enthusiastic hospitality. One memorable meal involved an authentic Swiss fondue that went on for several hours and involved the consumption of many bottles of cherry kirsch, white wine, and other spirits. (I think I remember that, anyway!)

After an early dinner on Christmas Eve, the tree was decorated with help from all, and candles were placed upon it but not yet lit. During the evening while we wrapped presents (none of this was done weeks ahead as we tend to do now) we heard music from outside and opened the door to a scene that took my breath away — a group of carolers was gathered outside in a field lit by lanterns, with a gentle snow falling upon them. I remember tears welling up as I stood listening to their beautiful voices in the cold night air. The carolers’ appearance seemed to be the signal for all the villagers to begin walking to the local church for a traditional Christmas Eve service. Later, shouted greetings and best wishes followed us home for the climax of the evening, the lighting of the real candles on the tree. It was, simply, breathtaking.

Red Birds

by Barbara Lambert

For a number of years when our three children were young, we spent every Christmas at our cabin at Whistler. But in 1978 all three of them were off at various universities. We decided, when they came home, to spend Christmas at our home in Horseshoe Bay. All our decorations, though, were back at Whistler.

So one day Douglas went out at lunch hour with a Grand Concept in his head. A tree that would be decorated completely in red.

He came home with with two boxes of the most luscious red apples with a shiny enamel gleam (somehow a box of softly felted green pears sneaked in too); many strings of red lights of all different shapes and sizes; and a box of delicate red-feathered birds. These made for a stunning tree. And we have used the same decorations ever since, though some have fallen by the wayside, and some eclectic bits and pieces have crept in. In particular the beautiful red-feathered birds have been a treasured feature every year.

Why do I recall so clearly that first red tree? It was a Sunday morning at the start of 1979 when we took the decorations down. Douglas and I were listening to the CBC. A morning-long program on the revelations that had come to light after the recent Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, of the horrors that had been going on there under the Khmer Rouge. Revelations new to much of the world, and completely new to Douglas and to me.

So maybe this is not exactly a “Christmas” story. On the other hand, every year when I rewrap those red birds in tissue, I think how blissfully ignorant I’d been when we first put them up, of a nightmare on the far side of the world. And yet how every nightmarish regime carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. There is hope that peace and sanity will prevail, even in the most troubled parts of our still-so-troubled world.

 

The Tree Bandit

by Cheryl Andrews

My Christmas tree tradition was all about hunting for that perfect real tree. Tree-trimming night, Christmas tunes roared through the house while my sons and I guzzled eggnog and made tree garlands of popcorn and cranberries. In 1991, my first Christmas in a kid-empty house, I switched to a silk tree, beaded garlands, all new ornaments … the works! When you can’t change circumstance, change tradition.

But my folks were the makers of tradition, the family hub at Christmas. They had a bottle-brush tree so jammed with keepsake ornaments from our large, blended family you couldn’t tell it was fake. Dad even had his own, custom-made Santa suit. The year my niece told all the kids Santa wasn’t real and Grandpa was in the suit, he had a neighbour do the “Ho! Ho! Ho!” Many little mouths gaped as Santa burst through the front door while Grandpa sat in his armchair!

In 2004, my parents died — Dad first, Mom three months later. My sister and I had carried the brunt of mom’s palliative care at home. We were heart-weary and physically exhausted, so we changed Christmas tradition and went to Florida. She and I spent a lot of time debating, tree or no tree. Our husbands felt the decision should be up to us. By bedtime December 23rd we were still weepy and undecided.

We woke up Christmas Eve to a beautiful Calusa pine standing in the lanai! My brother-in-law had snuck out in the wee hours that morning, hiked into the bush, and cut it down. He didn’t know it was a protected species in parts of Florida, and he’s fondly known to this day as the “Tree Bandit.”

By the way, all these years later, through many moves and life changes … I still have the silk tree.

 

 

Trees I’ve Loved

by Carin Makuz

1) The Charlie Brown ones from greengrocer’s, carried home through snowy streets. They were part of my earliest days in Toronto when I had less than no money. For some reason I thought the cheapest and simplest way to decorate was to make my own ornaments with a package of oven-bake clay. I still have them. They’re hideous and beautiful.

2) The one I gave Peter the first Christmas after his divorce, when he was in an apartment he hated. I asked to borrow his key, brought over a tiny tree while he was out, decorated it with dollar-store baubles and a couple of Bert and Ernie dolls (from Sesame Street) for the top. He had kids; I thought it might make them smile. I was stunned when, recently, we were talking with friends about the best gifts we ever got and he named that tree.

3) The big ones we chopped down at the place way out in the country that had a bonfire going and served hot chocolate. We’d spend at least an hour in the woods, searching and arguing about just the right specimen. Snowball fights too some years, as I recall. The prices were reasonable and the people who owned the land were great, down-to-earth. It wasn’t a tree farm so much as a forest that needed some thinning out. Almost all the trees were lopsided. Part of the charm. It’s not open anymore. My guess is the owners took their fortune and moved somewhere warm. Or maybe they’re just letting the forest regenerate …

4) The tabletop houseplant that served as a tree when we lived in the Caribbean.

5) The tiny bare branch trees I sometimes decorate now … the previous year’s models sans “leaves.” I can’t bear to toss them out on the road, so I keep them at the back of the garden and eventually they either become firewood, or serve for another year.

 

 

 

They Can’t All Be Like Them NB Trees

(A found poem, from Facebook)

by Elizabeth Yeoman

 

Yesterday via mobile

Anybody know if they are selling christmas trees at the sobeys on merrymeeting?

don’t know, but they got Maple Leaf Bologna $1.59 a pound.

Very helpful Sean. Thanks:)

hahaha

Churchill Square bud.

They were last week but they weren’t local trees.

Thanks

Dads got ns trees nova Scotia

Just got one jerm. Thanks though

K

Did you get one for me too?

Didnt mom. I will go with you still to grab one.

It’s OK. I’ll drive out to the TCH and saw down a wild one.

they are selling on ropewalk lane

Did you walk home with a Christmas tree in tow??

Ilse, you know those trees in NFLD are like midget trees, so Dom could walk home with one no problem!

hahaha Michel they cant all be like them NB trees

 

 

Small, Big, Just Right

The tiniest Christmas tree we ever had was provided by the hotel we stayed at in Hawaii the Christmas I was four years old. It sat on a table in the corner, Barbie-doll sized, dwarfed by the few wrapped presents my parents had brought along for my two-year-old sister and me to open. What I remember most about that Christmas, aside from being astonished that Santa and his reindeer could find their way to a place where there was endless beach instead of endless snow, was the discovery of Captain Kangaroo, and of the colourful mosaic mermaid on the bottom of the swimming pool (I’d hang in the water, eyes wide open, holding my breath, entranced). The only gift I recall from those around the miniature tree was a set of suitably wee plastic dinosaurs with very long names embossed in small hard-to-read print on their bellies. I coerced the two older women I befriended on the next balcony into deciphering them for me. Until Mom found me out there with my pile of dinosaurs and told me to “Stop bothering the nice ladies.”

*     *     *

The tallest tree we ever had was an unexpected gift. When I was a teen, my sister and I dated two close friends, Mark and Mike. One December, while my mother was out, they showed up on our doorstep with proud grins, dragging behind them a massive tree they’d chopped down themselves. I recall it had been felled somewhere they shouldn’t-a-bin felling, and I don’t even want to think about how they transported it — they both had very small cars.

We couldn’t get that tree in the side door, so with much lifting and levering,  pushing and yanking,  grunting and groaning, cursing and giggling, we jammed it through the front door into the hall, then through another door into the living room of our 165-year-old stone house with its 12-foot ceilings, leaving a trail of sticky needles and debris. With anticipation we set it in a corner and tried to right it … only to discover it was two feet too tall. Since we couldn’t very well jam it back through two doorways to the outside, there was just one logical recourse: the guys set to work with a saw in the middle of the living room, only adding to the mess and to my sister’s and my certainty that when Mom got home and saw what we’d done, we wouldn’t live to see Christmas. (We knew this partly because our three younger siblings were freaking out and reminding us so.)

Finally we wedged the tree into place, barely. There was no room even for the treetop star. But it was glorious: the grandest tree we had ever had. I’m sure our hurried clean-up left much to be desired — but if Mom noticed, or wondered how we kids had managed to squeeze that much of the Outside into our Inside, she never said.

*     *     *

Hans and I moved in together in Kingston within a couple of weeks of my return from Japan, where I had by then lived and worked for three years. We had known each other for three years before I left Canada, and in the time I’d been away I’d returned twice for extended holidays — most of which we’d spent together. We’d also broken up, gotten back together, and, a year before I came back for good, decided to make a life together. But in our starry-eyed naiveté we hadn’t figured on the rocky adjustment period.

I loved him, but at the same time felt I’d left some vital part of myself behind in Japan. Reverse culture shock made me an extremely grumpy person to be around. Hans, meanwhile, was entering second-year law school with its inherent stresses. We alternated between being ecstatically happy and romantic, and arguing over the minutiae of cohabitation (like where in the kitchen to put the coffee-mug tree). And four months after my return, in late November and before we’d had time to sort this stuff out, I was pregnant.

We were shocked by the news, and thrilled, scared, confused. We were also poor. Yes, we wanted children together, but … already? I moved back to my mother’s for a week so we could have time apart to think things through. We talked on the phone in uncharacteristically subdued voices and hung up with nothing resolved. I imagined possible lives that didn’t involve Hans. They all made me cry. Then a few days passed during which I didn’t hear from him at all.

When he finally called, he simply asked me to meet him at “our” place — the Chinese Laundry Café. He didn’t say why. But when I got there and we sat down together, he took my hand in his and looked at me. We didn’t have to say anything. We both knew.

A week later, we chose a Christmas tree and dragged it home. It was a tad scraggly, I realize now in looking at the photos, but it fit our compact, barely affordable apartment. It wasn’t too little and it wasn’t too big. It was just my height, actually. And it was ours, together.

I couldn’t say which present meant more to me that Christmas: the moment at the Chinese Laundry Café when we made a promise — one we’ve kept now for more than 20 years — or the awareness, as we decorated that just-right tree, that the following Christmas we’d be three.