Tree Update

I need to add to Anna's initial tree descriptions. Our tree does not come to a point. Its like a church without a steeple. It is Howard Roark's tree (any readers out there? Who can name it?) I think our tree might be missing some chromosomes. Or have too many. The more the merrier we say at this time in the season. I have not fed the tree since that first night we turned it into a diabetic. I bathe the leave in metformin twice a day, glipizide on days when it acts very thirsty. Who feeds a tree soda? It can make its own food. Let just bottle up some sunshine and put that in the till.

O Tannenbaum

My roommates and I got our first Christmas tree the other day, and the arguing began before we even got the tree in the car. I guess this sort of thing is bound to happen – all four of us have set notions of how Christmas ought to be celebrated, and the tree quickly became the vessel embodying all that expectation.

You could say I started it. Bundled up and squinting through the foggy windows of Jenn’s car, I was concerned, as usual, about something that was still a few steps away: what did we have to trim the tree? I had one string of lights, but no real ornaments. I was envisioning some long ribbons, classy chains of silver or gold balls, but when I suggested “tinsel” as a broader category of trimming supply, all hell broke loose. Turns out Dari hates tinsel; Alli suggested popcorn strings and was probably sorry she did.

We had wanted to cut our own tree down, but as the freezing rain continued all afternoon we opted for pre-cut, on the grounds that at least we weren’t getting a fake tree. We had scoped out the tree sales in our neighborhood, and we cruised around the eastern suburbs of Cleveland, yelling about tinsel all the way to our first stop. The first church was closed; the second looked more promising. We filed out of Jenn’s car into the parking lot, hidden under hoods and hunching our shoulders against the freezing rain.

Our options were scotch pine (the cheapest), then Douglas Fir, then another tree which we immediately disregarded because it seemed to be going for around $95. “We’re girls on a budget,” I told the Christmas tree guy, who looked dubious about our prospects of buying anything from him.

Alli wanted to know if a group of trees had been painted. (Painted?) “Yeah, those are the painted ones,” the tree guy told us grudgingly, and as soon as he admitted this, I realized it was pretty obvious – the needles were a shiny blue-green that, after having been to many Christmas tree farms as a child, I did not recognize.

“How did you know they were painted?” the tree guy’s supervisor asked, in a tone which implied that the rest of the sentence was, “and don’t tell anyone else about it, either.” (Alli’s inside information came from having gone Christmas tree shopping with her mother the weekend before.) Dari and I refused to have a painted tree in the house, but we also refused to pay $95, so we headed back to the car. Shivering, we waited with Jenn while Alli negotiated with the tree guys. Jenn was hopeful: “this is the part where she comes back with a tree for $20.” But alas - an unpainted tree for $44 was the best we were going to get, so we gave up and headed to the one place guaranteed to have a tree which would fit both our living room and our pocketbooks: Home Depot.

Home Depot had Douglas Fir, Blue Spruce, and a variety of pine which we did not further investigate because Jenn refused to have a pine in the house, for reasons she did not delineate. Personally, I have always like Douglas Fir[1], but it’s hard to go wrong with blue spruce, which is what the rest of the house wanted. I felt like Charlie Brown as we stood in the rain in the Home Depot courtyard and picked out a tree which did not quite look the six-to-eight-feet advertised by its label. It and all its neighbors were wrapped in blue plastic netting, which made Alli nervous about any defects hidden underneath. “What if we get home and it’s all scraggly?” someone wondered aloud.

We could only find a plastic stand, which led to a lot of griping about what had become of Christmas these days. (“What happened to metal stands?” I asked.) Once we had the tree in the car, though, we inhaled deeply the smell of Christmas and forgot all about the plastic stand.

On the way home a second dispute was born over the issue of nutrition: did the tree require any sort of supplement? I said no, just water, and called my father for confirmation. Dari claimed that trees needed soda (“Black or clear?” Jenn wanted to know), which we deemed preposterous.

I insisted on setting the tree up to dry in the basement. Jenn and I freed it from the plastic hair net and opened up the branches, which turned out to be a relatively painful endeavor. (Dari later told me this was the first she’d heard of drying the tree.) A few hours later we pulled it up the stairs. Five-foot blue spruces weigh more than you’d think, and we listed up the stairs, squeezing ourselves through the door and back again on our way to the living room. We released a shower of needles with every movement. Jenn held the top – and most of the tree’s weight – as I guided the trunk into the stand. I seemed to remember that there was a lot more yelling when my father and brother set up our family tree.

We tackled the lights next. The decision to use white lights was unanimous, but I also insisted on using the lights with green wire – which, along with using straight-up water to feed the tree and drying it before placing it in the stand, is in accordance with Linden Brady Christmas tree dogma[2]. Instead, my green-wired lights ran out after one loop around the base of the tree, and we had to finish with icicle lights. Taking great pains to hide as much of the white cord as possible, we sang along to WHAM! and Mariah Carey (thank you, satellite radio).

The sum total of tree trimmings was the following: half-a-dozen miniature ornaments, the largest about a cubic centimeter in volume; a stuffed animal mouse; two colored globes, sans hooks, which we balanced on the branches; a lego angel which I got in my shoe on St. Nicholas Day about 14 years ago; and two long, red shoelaces[3] which I draped like ribbon between the boughs. Halfway through the trimming Dari announced that her mother had confirmed the value of soda in tree nutrition, so we spiked the tree’s water with Sprite. “We’re making the tree diabetic,” yelled Jenn, but despite the high-sugar diet, I felt it would be hard to destroy the tree in the two weeks remaining before Christmas.

We wondered what to put on the top of the tree. A star – maybe. I vetoed an angel. Jenn suggested a blood donation bag, at which point I informed her that she could never call me a nerd again. I wasn’t sure what should go on the tree, but I felt it should embody a value of our house. (Hence no angel.) Should we put up the blue-and-yellow HRC equals sign? A toy stethoscope? A peace sign? So far the tree remains relatively unadorned, but that hasn’t detracted from the effect it’s had on the collective mood of our house. Just the sight of the lights through the window as I arrive home is enough to lift my spirits with memories of Christmases past.

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[1] My attachment probably stems from a childhood of Decembers spent listening to our cassette of Raffi Christmas songs, which included “Trimming the Wicks on Douglas Mountain.” It’s not exactly Johnny Mathis or Robert Goulet, but it’s a fine album – “Petit Papa Noel” is probably my favorite track.

[2] I say “Linden Brady” dogma because my cousins, the Summit Bradys, always used colored lights on their tree, and I can’t truthfully speak to the particulars of all the other Brady trees.

[3] If you were to investigate the tree closely, you might notice that the shoelaces say “The LaSalle Bank Chicago Marathon” in black lettering. They’re an appropriate decoration for our house; we joked about adding old sneakers – maybe they could go on top, especially since the tree sort of plateaus, rather than peaks.