Having watched the National Lampoon Christmas Vacation movie for the umpteenth time, in particular the opening scenes about procuring the Griswold Family Christmas tree, I was inspired by how it rang true to my experiences.
In truth, the whole movie, with its dysfunctional family celebrations, resonates with the the majority of the populace, hence it’s enduring popularity. We all could tell tales. Here is my brief history of our Christmas trees.
My earliest recollections of my family’s Christmas tree experience was going to the lots that sprang up in December, buying a tree that looked a lot more full and straight on the lot, and then wrestling with the thing at home to get it to stand up in the holder.
Hatchets were wielded to trim the trunk to fit (and ostensibly to promote water flow to prolong needle life on the tree). Sometimes support strings were attached out of sight to aid in the fight to keep the tree erect despite gravity.
Eventually, our massive cardboard box of ornaments and lights were fetched from the attic and the tree was decorated. A week or two later, the whole process was repeated in reverse and the tree was sent to the curb.
Somewhere along the line, my dad, who was an idea man short on execution, decided buying cut trees was a waste of money. He had some property in Somerset County and his plan was to dig out our annual Christmas tree, keep it alive for the holiday season, then transplant said tree to that country plot of land. For what purpose, I’m still not sure.
What this meant for my brother and I was the act of procuring a Christmas tree became a whole lot more difficult.
My dad located a place that would allow us to dig up and purchase a tree. It was my brother and I who would accompany my dad, wield a pick, shovels and an ax to sever roots, load the whole thing into a large plastic tub and then into the bed of whatever pickup truck the old man was driving at the time.
Customarily we picked a rather smallish tree. Where our previous cut trees had tended to be in the six- or seven-foot range, these prospect transplant trees were more often four or five feet.
After the customary decoration and de-decoration in keeping with the season, the trees would be taken out to our land, where the brother and I again would be expected to dig into concrete-like frozen ground to make a suitable hole for the tree.
About four months later, we’d go out and check to find a dead, brown tree. And yet this act was repeated annually until we grew up and the old man gave up on it all. Call it the triumph of hope over experience.
There was a wide divide in how my grandparents addressed the whole Christmas tree matter.
My maternal grandmother lived in abject poverty, in a Walnut Grove hovel. My grandfather was dead from my very early years on, a victim of lung disease from his career as a coal miner. Yet my grandmother always seemed to have a magnificent live tree for Christmas. She also had those old bubble lights on her trees. I can’t believe this never led to the burning down of her house.
The exact opposite was my paternal grandparents, who lived in Dale Borough. They always were family first-movers of sorts, for example having been the first to acquire a cable television hookup.
It was during my early childhood that they made the move to an artificial tree. Those early trees didn’t even try to resemble live timber. My grandparents’ example had a silver wooden post into which branches were inserted. Those branches were thick metal wires with what looked like aluminum foil cut to resemble pine needles (if pine needles were silver, not green) attached.
One had to be careful with the lighting of these trees, lest a short circuit ruin your holiday. Often artificial tree people of the times had lights with a rotating color wheel beneath the trees to provide the illumination.
Our tree the past two years has been one of those pencil thin fakes, a consderable markdown from mammoth artificial trees we have displayed for many years.
But in the early years of my marriage, we went the live tree route, even anticipating that Christmas Vacation movie, which was released in 1989.
It was probably the early 1980s when the wife and I went out to a friend’s to hack down a tree he said was available for us, at a very small fee.
Like Clark Griswold from the movie, it turns out I had a problem judging size in an outdoor setting. I cut down the tree and struggled against gravity and friction from deep snow to drag this massive thing uphill to our waiting car.
At that point, I realized the tree was about as long, if not longer than my wife’s 1977 Plymouth Volare. I checked online and found that vehicle length to be a tad under 17 feet.
We lashed the thing to the roof, with plenty of tree hanging out the back and over the windshield. The fun was just beginning.
Once we got it home, I had to go to work pruning maybe seven feet off the bottom of the tree (our ceilings were just over nine feet) and trimming the massive branches to get the tree inside the house.
Eventually, we got it upright and decorated. The trophy was displaced in the corner of the dining room and protruded about halfway into the entrance to the living room. I just wish I’d taken pictures. But back then we didn’t all carry cameras/cell phones with us constantly.
That was my largest, most memorable live Christmas tree.
Looking back, at least I’d remembered the saw and hadn’t needed to dig it out.
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