THE EVOLUTION OF MY CHRISTMAS TREES

The Old Rusty Nail

AN E-JOURNAL FOR OLD PEOPLE

Russell Burton, an Old Person

A neighbor came over to my house the other evening and we trimmed my Christmas tree.  She like me is not a Believer so I guess I should call it a Holiday tree.  We do this every year as we have a martini.  I guess it could be called a tradition and it is great fun.  I call this Christmas tree a bottle brush tree for it is made of twisted wires all attached to a round metal tube which is fit into a three legged plastic stand.  Except for the stand the tree is covered with green plastic needle-like things.  The tree is shaped to resemble a Spruce evergreen.  It is 3 feet tall so it sits on a small wooden table I have in the living room. Of course the plastic stand is covered with a white cloth to resemble snow.

The tree lights are plugged into an electric strip with a switch which I push to bring the tree to life with its colors.  The tree lights are mostly white but the string on top has colored lights.  When I light the tree each morning it brightens my day.  And, it brings back great memories of when I was young and enjoyed Christmas so very much. 

The history of this tree is interesting for it involves the person I bought my house from several years ago.  She gave it to me because she did not want it anymore probably because it looked cheap and ugly.  So, when she moved to a larger more upscale house she bought a very expensive artificial tree which must be 10 or 12 feet tall.  I never considered this tree to be ugly for it is no doubt an early version of artificial Christmas trees.  Consequently because of its age it can now be regarded a ‘collectable’.

The decorations for this tree consists of four strings of tiny lights, strings of white plastic pearl like beads strung around the tree.  Decorations consist of many small plastic or wooden figures, many decorated balls some made of plastic and a few thin glass colored ones mostly small.  A long thin colored glass decoration adorns the top of this tree.  Now this tree top decoration with the glass balls remind me of Christmas trees when I was just a young boy.  But then these types of thin glass balls were larger hung from the tree branches by a wire hook. Today they are hanging from the tree with plastic hooks.

But, not all of the glass balls were simply round.  I remember some were larger and somewhat elongated with an indentation on the side of a different color.  A particular ball I remember had the indentation colored bright silver. The rest of the ball was a dark red.  Those special balls were handled with great care and when the tree was taken down these fancy balls were wrapped and carefully stored away for next Christmas.  

My first Christmas I remember was when I lived in South Dakota in the late 1930s.  I was about 6 years old I guess.  The tree was a real one which my father found someplace and cut it down.  I remember it to be rather tall but then I was short so it might not have been quite so tall.  It was adorned with a couple strings of various colored lights.  These lights were much larger than the lights used today and since they were wired in series instead of parallel when one light burned out the entire string did not light up.  How frustrating for my father who had to replace each bulb until the lights came back on.

What fun it was to throw the thin silver metal like ice cycles on the tree to make them look like ice cycles.  Of course the large glass colored balls were placed in strategic places on the tree to give it a nice symmetrical look.  Those balls made out of thin glass were very delicate so when one was dropped it usually broke into several pieces.  And, most every Christmas at least one was accidentally dropped to the sorrow of everyone in the room.  We all felt bad especially for the person who had dropped it.  Instead of the plastic stings of beads we strung popcorn on a thread using a needle. 

Making this rather large tree stand upright always required a rather detailed engineered

Stand made out of wood which my father built.  Large nails driven through the stand into the base of the cut tree trunk held the tree to the stand.  The tree would be place upright on the wooden stand and hopefully it would not tip over.  I remember the first metal tree stand in which the tree was simply placed in it and with screws held upright – no fuss, no muss.  But in a way some fun, even a little excitement and a certain amount of skill was lost with that invention. 

Of course this real tree gave off a pine-like smell which I vividly remember and I miss with my plastic tree.  Soon needles would begin to fall off as the tree aged.  Hopefully it would stay fresh long enough to last until New Years.  Obviously, as the tree dried it became a fire hazard. So, when to buy the tree was always a dilemma for if you bought it too soon it would not last the season.  But, to buy it too late meant less selection to find the perfect tree.

One year I could not find the perfect tree so I cut off some of the base to provide me some limbs.  Where the tree needed a branch I drilled a hole in the trunk in which I inserted and glued a limb. Suddenly I had the perfect tree.

I don’t remember each Christmas tree through the years but I do remember it was always a real tree.  And a real tree would be cut down. Of course, in those early years artificial trees did not exist so it had to be a real one.  Still, even when plastic trees became common my folks insisted on a real tree which they cut down as did I for many years when I became a father. 

For several decades the shape of the tree light bulbs remained the same.  A great improvement was the redesign of the tree light string so that when one bulb burned out the string remained lighted. But recently the tiny lights have become the norm.  They give off a bright light and use much less electricity which now days is an important factor.

But as I aged I began to buy real trees already cut down from a local tree stand.  For some reason that never seemed to be the same as when I would venture to a tree farm and cut one down.  Picking out the right tree was always a difficult job for it had to be the perfect tree and there were many trees from which to choose.  The perfect tree meant that it had to be precisely symmetrical with even the smallest limb in place. After finding and buying the perfect tree was the hassle of getting it into the car to take home.  Some how it was managed and the process of putting it into the metal stand and decorating it began with great anticipation and family enjoyment.

But, as artificial trees began to look more realistic and the realization of killing those thousands of spruce trees each year for no other reason than to decorate a home for a few weeks, I bought a very nice artificial tree.  Still, it was just a tree and not one with lights built into it.  That was just going too far.  As times past and the family has gotten smaller so has my Christmas tree which I described at the beginning of this essay.

Oh yes, I still enjoy my little artificial Christmas tree and Christmas holiday but in a way it is quite different.  Now the joy is mostly memories. We tend to forget the bad memories so all of them are full of joy.

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